Creating Your Personal Logo

What is a Logo?

Half-Life allows one to "spray" a personal logo or "tag" on any handy surface within a map. You can choose your logo in the same configuration window where you choose the name, model and colors that will be used by your player in the game.

Half-Life provides a standard set of logos, but it's easy to create your own if you have a graphics editing program. And, unlike models, there is no need to manually distribute your logo to your opponents -- the game will take care of that automatically.

Logos are a form of decal, the same graphic entity that Half-Life uses for blood, bullet holes, and much more. Your logo must be a 64x64 greyscale image, with 8-bit depth, in .BMP format, similar to the image at left. The one shown here is the JPEG version of my own tag. When you save the file in the directory:

Half-Life\logos

it will become one of the choices available to you.

Creating a Personal Logo

I normally use Jasc Paint Shop Pro to create my logos; it works great. Here are the general steps that you would follow.

1. Use File:New to create a new image. When prompted, enter the height and width as 64 pixels, the background color as Black, and the image type as "Greyscale (8-bit)".
2. Enlarge the image 5 or 6 times for easier editing.
3. Use any image editing tools to produce your greyscale logo. The image at right was done in a few seconds using the PSP "Picture Tube" feature.
4. Save your logo as type "Windows or OS/2 Bitmap (*.bmp)" in the Half-Life\logos directory.
5. Now start Half-Life, and go to the cofiguration screen. Your logo should appear among the list of other logos. If it doesn't, make sure you saved it as a .bmp file in the Half-Life\logos directory.

Here's another example, enlarged for your viewing pleasure.