[ de.alt.games.half-life ] Bunte Spraylogos

Coloured Spray Paint Tutorial

original by: Dave Johnston <http://planethalflife.com/davej (Who's computer is this?) >
submitted by: Tobias Wolter <tobias.wolter@epost.de>
Aktualisiert: <2001/11/02> 18:35:00
Postfrequenz: wöchentlich, Fr 20:00

Sometime earlier this year, the losersforlife website put up Dutch
instructions on how to make a colour spray paint which could be used
in any Half-Life game. However, Dutch isn't the most well taught
language around, and not many people could understand the
instructions. I couldn't either. But I've worked it out, and lo and
behold, here they are. Be wary, this is for experienced and advanced
users only. And also, please don't abuse this ability. It certainly
shouldn't be used for cheating of any kind, but more for entertainment
and identification (by entertainment, I mean by spraying new doors on
walls, and perhaps spraying over signs to momentarily confuse people
:) - teeheehee) I certainly don't want to hear or see it being used in
a way that may offend people, and I doubt you do either. Thanks.

Step 1: Making the spray paint 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 one's
dimensions aren't multiples of 16). Some possible sizes you might
like to try are: 64x64, 128x64, 112x80, 256x32, 192x48.

Ok, now you've 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 spray paint to be
invisible once sprayed onto a wall. If you can, turn off any
anti-aliasing feature your package might have, since these generate
blue hues that aren't pure blue. Only pure blue will be made
transparent. If you're 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 don't have to have any transparent parts if you don't
want to.

Step 2: Setting the palette

Now is the tricky part - qlumpy.exe only makes the spray paint
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 with a spray paint 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 you're lucky, the last few rows of the palette will
all be black, but sometimes they're all taken with various
colours. Either way, you'll need to tweak. Change the last entry to
pure blue (red-0 green-0 blue-255). Or 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 you'll 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 don't 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 aren't meant to be transparent with this
colour. This should 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. It's up to you to decide if it's worth it. Save the image
as {pldecal.bmp somewhere were you can get at it again.

Step 3: Compiling pldecal.wad

For this, you'll have to get the programs qlumpy.exe and
makels.exe. These would usually be available in Valve's large SDK, but
most people don't want to download this, so Wavelength have handily
split it into parts. The part we want is only 120k to download, and is
available at
<http://dl.fileplanet.com/dl/dl.asp?planethalflife/wavelength/2dart/texturesdk.zip (Who's computer is this?) >.
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
spray paint (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 spray paint in Counter-Strike,
copy the pldecal.wad into the cstrike/ directory. For TFC, copy it
into the tfc/ directory etc.

The next step is crucial - don't go into Half-Life and try to select a
logo. It's 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 spray paint, and you'll have to
copy the pldecal.wad again.

Anyhow, now start a game, or connect to a server as you usually would
(the in-game 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, you'll have to
wait, so don't come complaining to me if it isn't there when you try
to spray. If it hasn't been uploaded, a lovely hl logo will probably
appear. This means you'll have to wait longer.

And there you go. Your full colour logo should appear
(eventually). Congratulations if it works. If it didn't, try the
process again. If you're a decent programmer, you could even get the
source code for qlumpy.exe and perhaps make a nice front-end for it
(or even without the source code).

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.