There're two sections that you are able to customize: the host banner on top and the message of the day which takes up the majority of the screen on the bottom. These two sections are actually just web pages (html files), which can be entered into the files on the server or hosted on your own web server/web host. The two files to control these sections are “host.txt” for the host banner, and “motd.txt” for the MOTD. You can find these in your server’s L4D directory at left4dead. Note that this is NOT the same directory as the server.cfg file that you use to change server settings. The server.cfg file is located in left4dead/cfg/.
The default host banner and MOTD run off of Valve’s web servers. The default host.txt and motd.txt files contain only one line which is a URL to the website you wish to have displayed. You can either use this method if you have your own hosting or you can just fill the .txt file with HTML code. If you have multiple servers with the same banner, it’s best to use web hosting so you only have to change the banner in one place.
One very important thing to realize about the MOTD and host banner is that they change sizes depending on the resolution the player is running at. The following values are in pixels, you can click on the screen resolutions to see what the MOTD looks like on that resolution:
Screen Host banner MOTD
800×600 335×66 600×300
1024×768 430×86 766×382
1280×1024 575×115 1020×510
1680×1050 400×80 718×359
1920×1080 605×121 1076×538
The ratio of width to height for the host banner is 5:1, and the ratio of width to height is 2:1. You have two choices with the host banner: either make it one large size and have it be cropped for people on lower resolutions (which is what I believe Valve does), or you can use some CSS in your HTML code to automatically resize the banner no matter what resolution a player is using. This is the method we use, and it’s a simple little trick.
Host.txt is where you would change the upper logo and inside that file you should place this (edit the section that says "path to your logo" and "your heading", please note that path to your logo must be a URL)
<html>
<head><title>your heading</title></head>
<body style=”margin:0px;padding:1px;background:#000000;”>
<img src=”path to your logo” style=”width:100%;height:100%;” />
</body>
</html>
That’s all it is! The title doesn’t show up anywhere, so it’s not important. The body styling is to make sure the image appears in the very top left, with one pixel of padding (L4D adds that white border to both sections), and a background colour for when the image is loading. The image tag has a style of 100% width and height. If you go to that page in your browser, it’ll look really messed up. But since you know for a fact that every resolution has a 5:1 ratio for the host banner, it will always look fine and be in the same proportions. One little bug: on 1920×1080, when you first get into the game sometimes the banner is sized strangely (pic). Hopefully, this gets fixed.
The MOTD section is the same as the host banner – it can be either a hosted HTML file (place the URL on a single line in the top of the .txt file) or you can just put the HTML code directly into the text file. All we have is a simple background image with some centred text. The file you are looking to edit is motd.txt
If your MOTD is not showing up, you might have to set motd_enable 1 in your server.cfg.
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