PB Screenshot Concepts

PunkBuster Screenshots are taken in the background while the player is busy gaming. Since this is a background task, it cannot negatively affect the performance of the player by either taking up too much CPU usage, writing lots of data to the player's hard drive, or using up a lot of their internet connection's bandwidth. Therefore, the ideal solution of taking a full-screen high-definition screenshot of the player's view and uploading the resulting files to the server at regular intervals is not practical (unless the person has a really small screen and a fast computer, which is an uncommon combination).

There are restrictions put in place by PunkBuster in order to strike a balance between the desire to have as many useful and informative screenshots as possible and the need to prevent any negative performance consequences for the player:

• The total number of pixels in the screenshot may not exceed 82,000, and if a screenshot is requested where the number of pixels that would be returned is greater than that, the size of the screenshot will be automatically reduced to fit.
• No more than three screenshots can be requested from a player in a ten-minute period, and requests for any more than that will be ignored.
• PunkBuster will not attempt to take any screenshots if the game application is not active (it is minimized or does not have focus). This is primarily for privacy reasons.

The first restriction most significantly limits the options you have in taking screenshots as this restricts the area of the screen that can be captured in a single screenshot.