Create Animated Sprays in Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike

Expressing your individuality online can be difficult, especially if you’re a gamer. While running and gunning your way through games like Counter-Strike: Source or Team Fortress 2 it’s easy to get lost in the crowd. But leaving your mark on the world is easier than you might think. Animated sprays are a great way for you to tell your enemy that, not only have they been pwned, but that you're the one responsible.

Custom animated sprays were limited to the most elite players in the days of Counter-Strike 1.6, but now that Source is here that’s all changed. So prepare yourself for a quick and easy way to make your own spray and let the lolcats run wild!

What you need:

• Adobe Photoshop CS3 (Trial works fine, free for 30 days, www.adobe.com)
• A game based on Valve Software’s Source engine with multiplayer
• VTFEdit

Time to complete: 2 hours

Step 1: Clean up your picture of choice

The hardest part of making your own animated spray is deciding what pictures to use. The choice is tricky, as the end result represents both your unique personal style, and your declaration of badassedness whenever you choose to use it. The choice can either be easy or agonizing.

Make sure that the background contents are transparent, otherwise when you load up your spray online there will be a big ugly white background!

For the sake of simplicity, we used a lolcat for our sample spray. The images are popular on the Internet, and occasionally even funny. Once you’ve chosen your picture, you'll want to place it on a transparent background using Photoshop. Open the original image, then press ctrl+a to select the entire image, press ctrl+c to copy it, and create a new canvas by pressing ctrl+n. The new canvas will already be the exact same size as the image on your clipboard, so you can simply paste it by pressing ctrl+v. It's a good idea to make a backup save of your image now. If you mess anything up, you'll be able to revert your changes much more easily if you have a backup.

Cut out the area of the picture that you want to be transparent by selecting it with the lasso tool, then pressing delete. Don’t worry about getting rid of everything at once, just remove unwanted background one chunk at a time. For bits of the image that are the same color, you can use the magic wand tool. This lets you select adjoining pixels that are the same color quickly and easily. When you've clipped out all the of the background that you want to, for each of the images you'll use in your spray, resize the image to 128 pixels wide using the Image Size panel (ctrl+alt+i), and move on to the next step.

Step 2: Create the backbone of your custom spray

Put your files side by side and make sure that they’re what you want other players to see. For me, this is right on the money.

Once you’ve got your picture(s) clipped, open them up side-by-side in Photoshop. This is the best time to input any text that you want in your spray. With the separate frames next to each other it’ll be easy to see exactly what your finished product will look like in-game. The one thing you can't do is create too many frames--due to the Source engine's 120KB spray filesize limitation, you probably won't be able to create more than five frames. Make sure everything looks the way you want it to and save the finished 128x128 images in one directory with names that alphabetize into the proper order for the frames (1 image.jpg, 2 image.jpg, etc).

VTFEdit's import process asks you all sorts of scary questions. Fortunately, you can just skip over them by pressing OK.

Now that all your images are properly sized, you're almost ready to create the spray. Open up VTFEdit, and go to File -> Import. Control-click each of the images you want to use, and click OK. Select the default options on the Import screen, and wait while your images are converted. To get an insanely high-speed preview of your spray, you can go to the Image tab and press Play. If everything looks right, you can go to the Info tab and make sure that the overall size of the spray is less than 120KB. Then save the file in c:/Program Files/Steam/steamapps//team fortress 2/tf/materials/VGUI/logos for Team Fortress 2, or your c:/Program Files/Steam/steamapps//counter-strike source/cstrike/materials/VGUI/logos folder. Once you've saved the file, go to the Tools menu and click Create VMT file, then save the resulting file to the same folder.

4: Enjoy!

All done! Mom would be proud if she knew the first thing about PC gaming. Or lolcats.

Now, your files should be in order, iand you can fire up your game and enjoy your handiwork. From the game's main menu, go to the options menu, and select the Multiplayer tab. Your new spray should be available in the drop-down list, for you to select. Before you venture into the wilds of the Internet, you'll want to test your spray in a private place, so why not create a server all your own, and make sure it works properly there. If you make adjustments to the spray, you'll need to disconnect and reconnect to the server in order to see any changes. Once you're happy with the way things are working, fire up your game and get spraying!

Not Feeling Animated?
Don’t sweat it! Stop yourself after you’ve cut out your picture and save it as a targa (.tga) Size doesn’t matter, so just place it somewhere that it’ll be found easily and import it from Counter-Strike: Source or Team Fotress 2’s in game menu.

The Easy Way to Switch to Linux

Back in May, we published a step-by-step guide to switching from Windows to Ubuntu Linux. A few weeks ago, in keeping with its regular release schedule, Ubuntu released an update to its popular and friendly Linux distribution. Known as Gutsy Gibbon, Ubuntu Linux 7.10 makes the install process easier and more streamlined than before, and adds some new features that you'll need to know about. So here's our updated guide to installing Ubuntu on your PC.

We’ve written about Linux in Maximum PC quite a bit over the last few years, but it’s only been in the past year that we’ve really seen this open source OS come into its own as a truly desktop-worthy contender. Apart from high-end gaming, there’s little Linux can’t do well. And since most major distributions come preloaded with all the software typical users are likely to need (as well as instant-download repositories to find any extras), getting up and running with Linux can actually take less time than installing all your apps in Windows.

While the number of choices in Linux distributions is staggeringly large—there are nearly 200 English-language distros that we know of—we recommend only one for the new user. Ubuntu is the most user-friendly distribution we've tested, with the most hardware support, the most intuitive menu interface, and the most widespread support from the PC industry of any other free distribution. So popular has it become, that even Dell now offers pre-installed Ubuntu systems to its customers.

Writing a comprehensive Linux guide is a daunting process—and largely unnecessary. The Linux community does a great job of documenting most of its software, whether it’s the developers actually writing docs or the end users figuring things out and sharing the acquired info with their pals. All the information you need to get running is out there, if you know what to search for on Google, that is.

And that’s where we come in. Books have been written with solutions for all the potential pitfalls the Linux-switcher faces. However, those books are outdated the moment a new version of Linux is released. Instead of just telling you what to do, we're going to tell you how to do things and explain why you’re doing them. We're going to focus on the things that are truly a challenge (and poorly documented), but still give you a head start on the easy stuff.

Before you get started, you need to be prepared to be your own support system. While you can usually get help with Linux problems on different message boards on the web, before you do that, you need to make the effort to solve your own problems. Linux DIYers don’t have much sympathy for people who don’t make an effort to help themselves.

Getting Started

With its modern installation tools, getting Linux on your hard drive is simple--at least compared to the bad old days. And Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon's install process is about as streamlined as Linux gets.

Like a lot of people who try switching to Linux, you’ve probably installed a distro or two, mucked around with it for a few hours, changed the theme, and maybe browsed the web a little. Then, when it was time to work, you jumped back to Windows, and all was right with the world.

Things are much easier now than they were in the early days of Debian, Slackware, and Red Hat. Modern distros such as Ubuntu and openSUSE install with crucial applications (web browser, photo editor, email client, word processor, etc.) and support for most hardware out of the box. With Ubuntu, you can boot off the CD to determine whether or not your rig will work with the OS before you make a single change to the hard drive. You can tell if you’re going to have a problem before you hose your system, which is always a good thing.

Before we get started installing Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, you’ll need to download the appropriate ISO file from the Ubuntu downloads page and burn it to disc. For neophytes, we generally recommend starting with the x86 versions, even if your CPU supports AMD64 extensions. The proper file name for most people will be ubuntu-7.10-desktop-i386.iso.

To burn the disc, you can use commercial burning software (like Nero) or download and install the free ISO Recorder software. It’s also a good idea to run a backup before you get started (or anytime you muck around with your partitions, for that matter).

There are three ways to make space for your Linux install: You can delete an unused partition, install another hard drive, or let the Linux installer resize an existing partition. If you have an unused partition on your hard drive that you want to use for Linux, it’s a good idea to remove that partition before you start the install process, since Linux can’t install to an NTFS partition. We recommend dedicating at least 20GB of space for your Linux install. To get rid of the partition, open the Computer Management tool in Windows and delete that partition. In Linux, you’ll have a tough time telling which partition is which, so to avoid heartbreak, do your deleting in Windows. If you don’t have an unused partition, we’ll talk about resizing your existing partition during the Linux install portion of this story.

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