[KKnD]

Tools Needed :
To create a coloured logo the way I describe you'll need to download and install the free (and excellent) Wally texture editor. You will also need a good graphics editor such as PaintShopPro, although you could create your logo entirely using Wally.
And here is a test file (the picture above) with test.bmp and pldecal.wad.

Everyone who plays Counter-Strike knows that you can customize a spraypaint logo which you can use in the game. Quite a few people also know how to create a greyscale bitmap image of their own which can then be selected in this menu and used in the game.

What nobody seemed to realise until recently is that there is no reason why a player logo should be restricted to being a greyscale image and that in fact any appropriately-sized 256 colour image can be used as a logo once it is converted into the WAD format that is used by Half-Life for all in-game textures.

What I will describe now is the process by which you can create and use a coloured logo in the game using the Wally texture editing tool.

Step 1 - Creating the image

The final image that will be converted into a WAD file must be a 256 colour (8 bit) BMP file. The image must be dimensioned in multiples of 16 pixels and can contain a maximum of 10752 pixels in total, meaning the largest sized image you can make is 96x112 or 112x96 (although you could make a very wide or very tall image instead).

Another important feature of the final BMP file is that the palette used must contain the full-blue (0 0 255) colour within it, even if it is not used. There must be just one full blue entry in the palette and this must be in the last position of the palette.

In PaintShopPro the best way to achieve all this is to include the standard windows colours when reducing an image to 256 colours and then to edit the palette to remove multiple full-blue entries and put the remaining one into the last position.

Once you've created an image and saved it as a 256 colour BMP you are ready to move on to the next step.

Step 2 - Importing into a WAD

NB: The process I describe here may not be the most efficient way of creating the WAD but it works, so I'll stick with it.

Start Wally and select File -> New from the top menu bar.

In the Create New Texture dialog box that appears, change the Type: to be Half-Life Package [wad3] [.wad] then click OK. A new untitled WAD package will appear.

Go back to the top menu bar and select File -> Open. Find your BMP file and Open it. Your bitmap image will appear in its own window.

Right-click on this image and select Copy then select the Untitled WAD window and go to the top menu bar.

Select Edit -> Paste -> Paste Into Package File. In the dialogue box that appears enter the name as LOGO and click OK. Your texture will now be visible in the WAD package.

With the WAD window still selected go back to the top menu bar and select File -> Save As and save the WAD somewhere as pldecal.wad.

Step 3 - Using the logo in-game

You now have a file called pldecal.wad which contains your logo. To use this in the game it must be copied over into the Half-Life\cstrike folders where it will replace the existing file.

NB: If you go into the Customize menu in-game your new WAD file will be overwritten with a standard grey-scale image so keep a copy of your WAD file somewhere safe. Also, if there is a problem with you WAD it will not appear in-game. Try starting a LAN game first to check whether it works and how it looks.