Also hier is jetzt das Tut für die "coolen" Logos! Ich würd ja auch gerne welche machen aba mir fehlen die 2 tools (qlumpy.exe and makels.exe).... wenn die einer hat bidde irgendwo uploaden und den link hier posten!?
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Step 1. Making the Spraypaint bitmap
Load up your favourite paint program, which in my case is Paint Shop Pro and start a new image. The dimensions are important here since there must be less than 12288 pixels in the image, and each dimension must be a multiple of 16. Therefore, a size of 64x64, or 128x64 is acceptable (the product of 64 and 64, and 128 and 64 are 4096 and 8192 respectively, both below 12288), whereas a size of 128x128, 256x256, or 67x175 are not (the first two have too many pixels, the last ones dimensions arent multiples of 16).
Some possible sizes you might like to try are: 64x64, 128x64, 112x80, 256x32, 192x48.
Ok, now youve got the image size worked out, make the image on top of that. To make transparent (invisible) parts of the spray, go into the palette, and find the BLUE colour (RGB value 0 0 255, hex value #0000FF), and paint this BLUE wherever you want the spraypaint to be invisible once sprayed onto a wall. If you can, turn off any antialiasing feature your package might have, since these generate blue hues that arent pure blue. Only pure blue will be made transparent. If youre using PSP, you can set the brush hardness to 100, or do what I do and simply use the fill tool on empty parts of the bitmap. You dont have to have any transparent parts if you dont want to. To the left is one finished example for Barrysworld.
Step 2. Setting the palette
Now is the tricky part - qlumpy.exe only makes the spraypaint properly if the transparent colour (pure blue) is the last entry in the palette, and is pure blue (not purple or black for example). If this is done wrong, you end up witha spraypaint that is all one colour, and mostly see through. First, decrease the colour depth to 256 colours (in PSP, Ctrl-Shift-3 does this). This should leave you with a 256-colour bitmap which is the only format we want.
We now need to edit the palette to change the last entry to pure blue. Go into whatever edit palette menu your package has, and find the last value. If youre lucky, the last few rows of the palette will all be black, but sometimes theyre all taken with various colours. Either way, youll need to tweak. Change the last entry to pure blue (red-0 green-0 blue-255). ow find the other pure blue entry that will by lying around, and change that to a very noticeable colour, such as a lime green, or yellow, red... something not used in the image. This way we can mark out the areas youll need to fill in with the new blue.
Back to the image. It might look quite bad at this stage. Some parts will be blue that you dont want to be, others are bright colours where the pure blue used to be. The first step is getting the transparency right. Get the fill tool, and fill in the parts you want to be transparent with BLUE (make sure the blue selected is the last entry in the palette). Now, you just need to sort out the rest of the image. Go to the palette, and find a colour which is similar to the colour the image used to be before the blue invaded it. Now, fill in the blue parts that arent meant to be transparent with this colour. This shold leave you with something very similar to the original (in the BW case, to the one in the previous step).
If that all went okay, that was the hardest step, and you may need to go over it a few times before it works, or you even understand what is going on. Its up to you to decide if its worth it.
Save the image as pldecal.bmp somewhere were you can get at it again.
Step 3. Compiling pldecal.wad
For this, youll have to get the programs qlumpy.exe and makels.exe. These would usually be available in Valves large SDK, but most people dont want to download this, so Wavelength have handily split it into parts. The part we want is only 120k to download, and is available here. Download that, and extract it somewhere.
Copy pldecal.bmp into the same directory as qlumpy.exe and makels.exe, ie, where you extracted the above archive.
Load up a DOS box, and find the same directory as makels.exe. Type in the command:
makels . pldecal pldecal.ls
And press enter. This will create the file pldecal.ls which qlumpy will handle.
Now, still in the DOS box, type in:
qlumpy pldecal
And again, press enter. This will create the pldecal.wad with your spraypaint (assuming all went right).
Step 4. Using pldecal.wad in Half-Life
Find the newly-compiled pldecal.wad and copy it into your Half-Life/valve/ folder. If it asks you to overwrite the existing logo, I suggest you cancel, and backup the pldecal.wad in Half-Life/valve/ before copying the new pldecal.wad across. Make sure you overwrite whatever is there.
In addition, if you want to use the new spraypaint in CounterStrike, copy the pldecal.wad into the cstrike/ directory. For TFC, copy it into the tfc/ directory etc.
The next step is crucial - DONT go into Half-Life and try to select a logo. Its already been chosen by copying this file into the above places. If you do go into the logo selection screen, the pldecal.wad will be overwritten by a normal style spraypaint, and youll have to copy the pldecal.wad again.
Anyhow, now start a game, or connect to a server as you usually would (the ingame browser should work, but it might mess up the logo. I use GameSpy). Join the game, and wait until your logo is uploaded to the server. This may take seconds, or minutes. Either way, youll have to wait, so dont come complaining to me if it isnt there when you try to spray. If it hasnt been uploaded, a lovely hl logo will probably appear. This means youll have to wait longer. Just wait, dammit!
And there you go. Your full colour logo should appear (eventually). Congratulations if it works. If it didnt, try the process again. If youre a decent programmer, you could even get the source code for qlumpy.exe and perhaps make a nice frontend for it (or even without the sourcecode).
Again, many many thanks to the losersforlife clan website for even discovering this very cool trick (I presume it was them who found it out), and deserve most of the credit.
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