Those of you who have modded, or created content for Half-Life (the original 1998 installment) know how picky its GoldSrc engine can get when it comes to file formats. Certain limitations must be strictly enforced lest you want to get a long list of errors. This extends to the images that will be used as world or model textures.
While there are several tools out there such as the veteran Wally or the Half-Life Texture Tools, they are mostly focused on creating and editing WAD files (archives that contain packages of textures). Sometimes you need something quicker and simpler, and that's why I wrote a small GIMP plug-in to do precisely that.
This plug-in (which is actually a Script-Fu script, written in GIMP's custom variant of the Scheme language) offers a straightforward interface to convert the currently opened image to proper GoldSrc format. It will also scale it down to 512x512 pixels (the maximum allowed texture size for models) or 256x256 (for world textures used in mapping) according to your choice. The resulting image will be saved to the same folder.
Here you can download and check a sample texture, before and after conversion:
- floor_concrete.png (original)
- floor_concrete.bmp (converted)
Download
- GitHub Gist
- script-fu-goldsrc-export.scm (alternative)