2 D   A R T Welcome to Wavelength's 2D Art section! Here you'll find tutorials on creating custom skins, decals, sprites, and other art for Half-Life.

	June 08 The new SDK 2.0 has been released for Half-Life, with some very nice things added. Check our main page for links to download it. Worldcraft 3.3 has some new enhancements including a sprite preview in the 3D View. It was reported that there were problems with sprites made from other sprite compilers, but Wavelength's Sprite Wizard makes a WC3.3-compatible sprite. In fact, with it's easy-to-use Windows interface, why use anything else?

	November 20 I've updated the Sprite Wizard to version 1.1 because of a problem with color sprites that had less than 256 colors in their palette. It caused banding distortion in the sprite, such as pictured below. Thanks to those in the Wavelength Forums for letting me know about this.

	October 05 Here's another editing program I've made. If you've avoided team colors for multiplayer skins because of the complicated palette, Palette Merge makes it very easy to make a correct palette. It even includes a tutorial integrated into the program. For more information about team colors, see my Skin Tutorial.

	September 30 I'd like to welcome ApocX to Wavelength and thank him for taking over the 2D Art Department. I've updated the article on Making Movies with Half-Life with a way to record the sound from the game.

	September 29 Hello! I'm the new 2d art columnist here at Wavelength. You may remember me from such TC's as: Star Wars Quake. I also run TextureCentral over at Gamedesign.net. To start things off I've made up a texture tutorial for anyone interested. You can go check it out here.

	August 09 I've got two articles tonight: Wad Graphics and Making Movies with Half-Life. For those who wanted to know what images were in the gfx.wad and cached.wad, I've posted Wad Graphics and put together some information about compiling the two wads. I've also compiled mkmovie.exe from the SDK and released it for download. It includes information, but Making Movies with Half-Life also tells about recording video and processing the file to make an .avi. Note these are different than .dem movies. If you'd like to make in-game movies, or demos, then check out Persistence of Vision.

	July 18 I've created another C++ utility to help out with Half-Life editing, the Gfx.wad Compiler. Previously there was no way to make your own gfx.wad since the format varies slightly because of two font files. Gfx.wad also contains the paused and loading text. Now you can edit the enclosed images and compile them. If you want to edit the fonts, edit the image then edit a coordinate script I've created to help with this. Then compile it. Cached.wad is another .wad that is compiled a little differently. For more information, see the article on Wad Graphics.