Posts Tagged ‘Custom’

Simple Pi, a friend, co-worker, gamer, geek and fellow Minecraft addict, recently gave me the above woodcraft. He had heard me talking about Portal 2 and how much I enjoyed it. He saw a similar craft online and thought he could do it too. Oddly enough, he won’t ever actually get to play the game because of his motion sickness; in fact, showing him a video of the game almost made him hurl.

Today will be the last day of PC Build 2011 (still typing 2001), and first day of the pita software installation. Beyond the image captions, there’s not much more to say other than there was no fire, although the finished project certainly looks like it has fire inside.

Oh, and I added another red fan to the side of the case – looks pretty sweet.

System specs »

Welcome back to PC Build 2011; today is where things can get Hairy. I will be installing the CPU, cooling unit, mobo, and RAM, any of which may be DOA or become very dead in the process. It’s like a very suspenseful (days-long) game, where it all comes down to the final power on. If you seen white hairs in the pictures, you’ll know why.

Incidentally, if everything seems out of order, it’s because the PSU and a few drives won’t be available until later.

Welcome to PC Build 2011, which I keep typing as 2001 because I’m old! Today, I will begin the construction of another custom, non-(barf)-Dell PC, using the components seen in the image above and some parts scavenged from said (barf) Dell. Also, because I am lazy, I will not be listing the system specs the cool way.

This build will include some exciting additional steps and new parts to me: a CPU cooler, a 6 Gb/s hdd, using thermal paste, and switching out front case fans.

It’s actually very simple. Things you will need:

• Minecraft.
• An archive program such as 7-Zip or WinRar.
• An image editing program and basic “Photoshop” skills.
• That irritatingly persistent OCD bug, whispering to you that you will never, ever have fun in this game until the GUI is perfect.

The original Minecraft GUI image files are located in C:\Users\[profile]\AppData*\Roaming\.minecraft\bin.

1. Open minecraft.jar with your archive program.
2. Double-click the gui folder, then drag-and-drop gui.png and icons.png onto your desktop. These two files contain the GUI and main menu images.
3. Edit those new pngs to your heart’s content.
4. Once done, create a new folder named “gui” and move the edited gui.png and icons.png files into it.
5. Archive the gui folder as a zip file.
6. Rename the zip to whatever you want your custom texture pack to be called, e.g. “wolf’s custom gui.”
7. Move this zip into C:\Users\[profile]\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft\texturepacks.
8. Make sure to select your texture pack in the main menu once in-game.

This method can be used to change other texture elements as well.

* AppData is a hidden folder, it can be made visible through Folder Options.

I’ve been tinkering around with a custom Team Fortress 2 menu for a couple of months and decided that I wanted it completed in order to move on to other things. So, now it’s finished and I offer it to you.

Click for more info and instructions »

This is a very quick recolor of the L4D2 Tank to make him appear similar to The Incredible Hulk. I say similar because he doesn’t look quite right without hair. Or eyeballs.

The skins are in vpk format for easy installation and instructions are included. I suggest that you only have one version installed in your addons folder at a time (until Valve fixes that particular bug). Download the classic skin here or the more modern skin here.

…With replacement backgrounds. Download the file for your monitor’s aspect ratio and copy into “…\Steam\steamapps\[user name]\team fortress 2\tf\materials\console”. If the folder does not exist, you will have to create it. There are two versions, one for the default UI and the other for the classic menu.

16:10 default UI 16:9 default UI

16:10 classic UI 16:9 classic UI