Half Life Logo - Create Your Own Logo

At Tidalworks, we are involved in anything and everything related to logo design;  which is why, when we saw there were a lot of people trying to figure out how to create their own “spray” Half Life logo,  we thought we would help them out.  Being involved in the design and software industry provides one great advantage over many other jobs - there is always a fellow gamer around the corner.  So, we were glad to lend a hand in this instance.

What is a Half Life Logo?

A Half-Life logo, known as “spray”, allows a player to paint his tag on a surface during gameplay. Half-Life does provide a standard set of logos, available in the player customization window - however hardcore Half-Life fans will inevitably be interested in creating their own custom designs. The following instructions work for the mods as well, including Counter Strike, Team Fortress, Firearms and more.  The logos are essentially the same type of graphic element (a decal or texture) that the game uses for bullet holes, blood, walls or other graphic details.

History of the Half Life Logo

Originally the Half-Life community was only aware that 64x64 grayscale images were able to used a spray. Valve explained that this was the only format that would work.   For some time, players went on creating their own grayscale images as spray. However, some time later the player community learned that the spray was stored within a WAD file - a file storing various game textures, in a decal named LOGO. We now know that you can create your own color image, store it in a bitmap, and import your design to be used as a spray during gameplay.

Image Basics

In order to create your own design, you will first need some sort of graphic design software - Photoshop, Photo-Paint, Paint Shop Pro, or a similar program will work well. Here are the rules for your design:

• Your logo must have both vertical and horizontal dimensions which are multiples of 16.
• Your bitmap file must be no larger than about 12 kb.
• Optimal size seems to be (256 or 128 width) x (16, 32, or 64 tall).
• Must have a 256 color palette, and the last color in the palette must be completely blue (RGB 0,0,255)
• This blue color is used as the transparent color
• Save your file as an 8 bit (256 color) bmp.
• Make sure the file is no bigger than 12kb.

Final Steps

Next, download the latest version of Wally at telefragged.com, or other similar software to import your bmp into a useable WAD file.  Once you have done this, take the WAD file and place it into your half-life\cstrike folder (or  corresponding mod directory).  After this, you are done, there is no need to select your spray within the game, as it will already be detected as your default.   Do not go into the player customization screen in Half-Life or your spray will be erased.