A Painful Capture

It's funny when something goes awry, after taking it for granted for so long....

I am sure I have made mention before about how I film the Armored Warfare action for videos I upload to my YouTube channel. Most of the time, I click on the capture program during the battle queue screen and let it all unfold. Rarely, I will go back into the replay folder and create something from there, but it has to be something truly special or couldn't be saved under normal circumstances.

Even then, I do have backup options. My first choice and ideal program is Nvidia Shadowplay. Since my laptop has a Nvidia graphics card and drivers, just makes sense to use it. Easy on the system resources and framerate doesn't take a serious hit. However, there is an issue with trying to start it up if an update has been released and not installed (not sure how they do that) or if I Alt-Tab from the game and attempt to capture something after that.

The second option (and the only other one that works for me, despite lengthy testing with other programs) is the built in capture that come with the game. When it was first released, there were some issues, but over time, they have improved on it greatly. Imagine my surprise at the painful results when I ran it during this Challenger 2 battle....

Now, unlike some other folks out there, I don't fly off the handle and ready up a finger to point blame without trying to get all the facts together. First thing after the battle completed was take a look at the system resources that were in use (Alt-Tab then Crtl-Alt-Delete to bring up the Task Manager). Everything looked well within normal operational parameters. Was it a software issue? Did I miss an update?

My answer came in a almost comical way. My battery warning indicator flashed that I was below 10% of available power. 

Let me explain here. Without going deep into the technical specifications of my Dell laptop, trust me when I say it is more than capable of running this game and multi other tasks, at the same time. For heating issues (haven't encountered them, as of yet) I was proactive enough to pick up a powered cooling pad around the same time as acquiring the Dell. Also, I read up on and educated myself on the increased power consumption of gaming versus normal battery use discharge, so I always have it plugged in when attempting activities in the virtual realms.

Which is all well and good, if the wife doesn't turn the power bar off, to save money while the family sleeps and/or leaves a note explaining this so when the household does wake up to compute, the power bar can be turned back on.

I guess that old adage about "assume" came into play and got me.