How do I let iphone users screengrab their game

Hi, I'd like to let iPhone and android users grab screens of their game (pause then click a camera button) and then the screen-grab should save to the device, I guess in its default photos folder. Is this possible?

Thanks

Mike

It would have to be from what ever third party exporter you are using. C2 does not have access to a home folder, however you can:

A: Save the screenshot internally(webstorage, pretty limited)

B: Allow the user to download the screen shot(depends on the device)

C: Mail the screenshot(depends on the device)

D: Send the screenshot to a third party(php, cloud{dropbox,etc}, via ajax

Most of which will require the image be converted from base64 if you want to use the image in anything other than C2.

My clients hoping for an easy way to allow the player to take screen shots then send post them via instagram, all on the same device..

It doesn't sound like this is going to be easy...if possible at all...

any thoughts anyone?

thanks.

That would probably be a better idea than saving to a device folder, but you are going to need a plugin developer to do it.

iOS actually has a built in way to take screenshots and save them to the photos folder. Simply press the home button and the on/off button at the same time.

Isn't there a built in canvas snapshot option built in?

Arima heh I do that all the time, just not on purpose.

BluePhaze Yes, its everything in the viewport in a base64 string.

but then how to get the canvas snapshot into the right format and right place where the player can find it and easily send it off with instagram?

I don't want to have to tell the player to hold and press actual phone buttons to take screen shots, I want it to be a convenient in game feature that persuades more players to do so, who otherwise might never do it.

Taking a screenshot with the buttons already puts it in the right format. I haven't used Instagram, but it assume it's like other apps where you can choose an image from the photos saved to the device (don't know how it works on android, but on iOS all images are saved to the same location so it would be easy to find). I don't know of any way to directly send an image to another app, and I'm not sure Instagram can even receive images in that manner either.

I don't understand why you don't like the solution for iOS - doesn't it do exactly what you described, save an screenshot of the game to a photos folder? Then the user could switch apps, select the image from their photos and post it? I'm not sure it gets more streamlined than that.

What he's wanting is no different than what the Twitter plug does.

You push a button, an auth window comes up, and some data is sent to a server.

Well a little more complicated, and a bit more data.

Ah, ok, I didn't know there was something that does that.

The other draw backs of hitting the buttons on the device is that you have to pretty much pause the game first if it is not on a static screen. Which means in most cases your screenshot from the phone buttons is going to have your PAUSE UI on the screen. Putting a feature in the game to do this gives you much better flexibility in terms of not showing pause UI, etc... as you have complete control over the conditions the image is taken in.

The other diference is psycology and marketting.. if its built into the game, as a feature and suggested action, people are more likely to want to do it, which will spread the awareness of the game more....a pop up saying, hey, you can press these keys to take a screen grab of this and any app, is an option, but obviously is IOS specific and its basically just telling the user to do all the "work" themselves...making it no longer a feature, but a request tha tthe player go out of their way to advertise your game for you...its psycological, and the diference is quite important.