Tutorial: Splash Screens for Steam Last edited 18 years ago2005-10-25 04:00:00 UTC

In this tutorial you'll find out how to use a custom splash screen in Steam HL. Start by reading the related tutorial for WON HL if you haven't already.

You will need:

• Steam HL
• Steam Splash Creator
• GCFScape

Modding the Steam main menu is slightly more complicated then in WON HL, but oh so much more flexible.

Part 1: Creating your mod

Do this like in the first part of the WON tutorials, except that your mod should be located in: C:Program FilesValveSteamSteamAppsyournamehalf-lifeyourmod

Furthermore, you'll have to create the following new folders.

• yourmodesource
• yourmodesourceackground
• yourmodgfx

Part 2: Splash Screens

Then make your splash picture: 1024x768 is recommended. Save it somewhere as a Windows Bitmap (.BMP). Open up Steam Splash Creator and press Load Image. Select your image and press "OK". Now press Make Splash select the background/ folder you created earlier, and you're done.

Part 3: The Game Menu

You wanna edit the menu links, right? Open half-life.gcf with GCFScape and extract GameMenu.res from valve/resource in the GCF to yourmod/resource. Open GameMenu.res with a text editor. You'll see a bunch of segments of parameters.

	"9"
	{
		"label" "#GameUI_GameMenu_FindServers"
		"command" "OpenServerBrowser"
		"notsingle" "1"
	}

This one, for example, is the Find Servers button.

"label" controls the label, shockingly enough. #GameUI_GameMenu_FindServers gets the title from the language file, but unless you're planning on multilanguage support you can just change it to anything you want.

"command" controls what happens when you press the button. OpenServerBrowser is a Steam client command that opens the server browser. (Damn, it's all so self explainatory) You can change it to any other Steam command, such as OpenLoadGameDialog which would cause the button to open the load game dialog instead.

Avalible commands are:

• ResumeGame
• Disconnect
• OpenPlayerListDialog
• OpenNewGameDialog
• OpenLoadGameDialog
• OpenSaveGameDialog
• OpenServerBrowser
• OpenCreateMultiplayerGameDialog
• OpenLoadDemoDialog
• OpenChangeGameDialog
• OpenOptionsDialog
• Quit

I'll let you guess what they do.

You can also use engine commands.
Entering engine <console command>, would cause the button to execute the console command when pressed. Example:

"command" "engine map c1a0"

This would cause the button to start the map c1a0.

The third parameter, "notsingle" makes the button invisible in singleplayer mode. Other similar parameters are avalible: notmulti, OnlyInGame and notsteam. They can be used together, like this:

"notsingle" "1"
"OnlyInGame" "1"

This would cause the button to only be visible when in a multiplayer game.

Part 4: Dialogs

That's not all you can customize, oh no. You can customize all the dialogs as well. They all have their own .res file in half-life.gcf/resource, and should be extracted to yourmod/resource.

NewGameDialog.res contains the new game dialog (Couldn't guess, could you?).
The dialogs are more complex then the menu. If you open the .res you'll see segments like these:

	"Training"
	{
		"ControlName"		"RadioButton"
		"fieldName"		"Training"
		"xpos"		"40"
		"ypos"		"94"
		"wide"		"220"
		"tall"		"24"
		"autoResize"		"0"
		"pinCorner"		"0"
		"visible"		"1"
		"enabled"		"1"
		"tabPosition"		"1"
		"labelText"		"#GameUI_TrainingRoom"
		"textAlignment"		"west"
		"dulltext"		"0"
		"default"		"0"
		"SubTabPosition"		"1"
	}

This is the Training Room radiobutton. "labelText" changes the label. The other stuff should be self-explainatory enough, you'll have to try and change them and see what happens.

You can also change the colour of these dialogs, but I won't explain this in any detail. The colour scheme is contained in ClientScheme.res. You should be able to figure it out or find some old Steam skin creation tutorial, as the process is pretty much the same.

Part 5: Steam Games icon
As you might have noticed, some games have small icons in the Steam games list. You can, too.

Create a 16x16 32bit tga, name it icon.tga and put in yourmod/gfx. Open liblist.gam and add a new line; icon "gfx/icon"

Now you should be all customized up and ready.