Punkbuster Screenshots

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Punkbuster Screenshots

Post by badbadrobot »

We have a player that is playing with us that we are very suspicious of. Our servers are running punkbuster and was wondering how we could find a screenshot of his screen.
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Re: Punkbuster Screenshots

Post by chemist »

I use ProCon for managing PBSS's. It's as simple as right clicking on the users name (in the procon interface) and selecting "Trigger PB Screenshot". You can also install plugins that allow you to type "!SS Playername" in-game and it takes a SS.

After that has been done, a few seconds later the SS will show up on your server. I've noticed that its often the case where the SS returns a black image (or says that it could not retrieve SS from the players machine). this is caused by running out of date GFX card drivers (on the clients side) or possibly blocked by their hacking software.

Hope this helps.
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Re: Punkbuster Screenshots

Post by Edge100x »

To do it from the control panel's rcon tool here, or from in-game, without needing a 3rd party utility, a command like this may work:

!pb pb_sv_getss "some_part_of_player_name"

Where "some_part_of_player_name" is a unique part of the player's name.
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Re: Punkbuster Screenshots

Post by badbadrobot »

Ok so we got the plugin in, I am able to take SS's through procon, and I can find them on the server. Now I'd like to alter the pbsv.cfg settings to get a little bit bigger resolution then 320x240.

Are there any restrictions as to how big we can go with resolution? Right now I'm trying:

pb_sv_SsWidth 700 //[Requested pixel width of remote screenshots]
pb_sv_SsHeight 525 //[Requested pixel height of remote screenshots]
pb_sv_SsXpct 70 //[Percentage across screen for remote screenshots]
pb_sv_SsYpct 70 //[Percentage down screen for remote screenshots]
pb_sv_SsSrate 1 //[Sample Rate for remote screenshots]

Does the server need to be restarted before these settings update?
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Re: Punkbuster Screenshots

Post by Edge100x »

You can try large numbers for the size, but I don't think that PB supports much beyond 400x204. It will automatically reduce your number if it doesn't support it.

You can re-execute the pbsv.cfg at any time. Through our control panel:

!pb pb_sv_load pbsv.cfg
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Re: Punkbuster Screenshots

Post by badbadrobot »

Is there a reason they don't support bigger resolutions? Seems like you could miss so much with such a tiny screenshot.
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Re: Punkbuster Screenshots

Post by TimeX »

One problem is that the larger the screenshot is, the more of a lag spike the player could see as a result of taking the screen shot and then uploading it to the server. That is a concern with PB screenshots on all games.
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Re: Punkbuster Screenshots

Post by badbadrobot »

So basically were stuck with stock settings? Oky doky! Thanks for your help guys.
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