Thanks to http://league.totalgamingnetwork.com/ for providing this information.

The TGL is proud to announce a series of eight mini-leagues for a total of seven games: Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142, Call of Duty 4, CounterStrike: Source, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Frontlines: Fuel of War, and Team Fortress 2. Matches will begin on the week of August 10th; map lists, rule sets, and server configs are still being finalized for all games.

These mini-leagues will run 2-6 weeks, depending on the specific release date for the new TGL website once it is completed, and there will be no playoffs or league champions. However, there will be prizing. The top three teams (as determined by team weight and tie-breakers) at the conclusion of each individual mini-league will receive a free server from MyInternetServices.com for a 3-month time period. Combined, MyIS is awarding game servers to 24 teams.

These events represent a time for the TGL to gauge interest in past games, and to test new maps, rule sets, and server configs. We encourage everyone to participate and provide us with your highly respected feedback in the official Mini-League Forum. Registration for full league seasons and tournaments will begin as soon as the new site is released, and we look forward to acquiring additional prizing for TGL members in these future events.

-Battlefield 2 5v5 Infantry Only
-Battlefield 2142 6v6 Infantry Only
-Call of Duty 4 5v5 Hardcore S&D
-Call of Duty 4 5v5 ProMod S&D
-Combat Arms 5v5 CTF
-Combat Arms 5v5 S&D
-CounterStrike: Source 5v5
-Enemy Territory: Quake Wars 4v4 Infantry Only
-Frontlines: Fuel of War 6v6
-Team Fortress 2 6v6

For all those who want to learn how to skin their goldsrc models, this tutorial is for you. This tutorial will work with all goldsrc games. Just replace Counter-Strike with whatever appropriate.

Things you will need:

1. GCFScape
2. Jed’s Half-Life Model Viewer
3. Photoshop (If you don’t have Photoshop you can download a free 30-day trial or download The Gimp - A free graphic editor with almost the power of Photoshop)

Extracting your model from the GCF File

1. Open up GCFScape and browse to your Counter-Strike.gcf file. This file is usually found under C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps. Steam stores all game data in the Game Cache File. We are going to look for a model to skin in the GCF.
2. For this tutorial, We are going to skin an Arctic Avenger. Browse to cstrike\models\player\arctic. Right-click arctic.mdl and click Extract. A window will come up asking where you want to put the file. Go ahead and put it wherever you want but remember where you put it. I like to make a folder on my Desktop to place all my files in to stay organized.

Extracting the texture from the model with JHLMV

1. Open up Jed’s Half-Life Model Viewer and open arctic.mdl.
2. Go to the Textures tab. You will see a flat image of the model’s texture. This is what is placed on the 3-D model to texture it.
3. Hit Export Texture. You will be prompted to save the texture. Name and place it what ever you want but remember where it is.
4. Hit Export UV Map. Place it in the same spot as the texture but make sure your able distinguish them.

Editing your texture

I am going to split this section into two parts: A The Gimp tutorial and a Photoshop tutorial.

The Gimp

1. Open up the texture into The Gimp.
2. The image is currently in indexed mode. In this mode you can only color the texture with the colors already defined in the texture. This may result in you not getting the exact color you want. You must put the image into rgb mode. This will allow a larger color palette. To put the image in color mode, select Image>Mode>RGB. You can now freely edit your texture.
3. This step is optional but is very helpful. Open up the UV map file. Click Select>By Color and select a black area to select all the black in the image. Now hit delete. Don’t deselect yet. Go to Select>Invert. This will select all the white lines in the image. Copy the lines by going to Edit>Copy. Now go to the texture and hit the Create New Layer button which looks like a sheet of paper. With the new layer selected paste the white lines by hitting Edit>Paste. Now select the layer with the texture to make sure your editing the right thing. If you can not find the Layer Toolbox, go to Dialogs>Layers to bring it up. This will show you what pieces of the texture will be applied where on the model.
4. Do the heck whatever you want to your image. Once your done, you have to put the image in indexed mode or else it won’t be readable by Jed’s Half-Life Model Viewer. If you used the UV map, place the layer in the trashcan in the Layer toolbox to delete it. Go to Image>Mode>Indexed. A window will appear. Make sure Generate Optimum Palette is selected and the Maximum amount of colors is 256. Hit Convert.
5. Save your image.

Photoshop

1. Open up the texture in Photoshop
2. The image is currently in indexed mode. In this mode you can only color the texture with the colors already defined in the texture. This may result in you not getting the exact color you want. You must put the image into rgb mode. This will allow a larger color palette. To put the image in color mode, select Image>Mode>RGB. You can now freely edit your texture
3. This step is optional but is very helpful. Open up the UV map file. Click Select>Color Range. A window will appear. Go to the drop menu and select shadow. This will select all the black in the image. Now hit delete. Don’t deselect yet. Go to Select>Inverse. This will select all the white lines in the image. Copy the lines by going to Edit>Copy. Now go to the texture and hit the Create New Layer button which looks like a sheet of paper. With the new layer selected paste the white lines by hitting Edit>Paste. Now select the layer with the texture to make sure your editing the right thing. If you can not find the Layer Toolbox, go to Windows>Layers to bring it up. This will show you what pieces of the texture will be applied where on the model.
4. Do the heck whatever you want to your image. Once your done, you have to put the image in indexed mode or else it won’t be readable by Jed’s Half-Life Model Viewer. If you used the UV map, place the layer in the trashcan in the Layer toolbox to delete it. Go to Image>Mode>Indexed. A window will appear. Make sure one of the Locals is selected and the amount of colors is 256. Hit Ok.
5. Save your image.

Putting your new texture on your model

1. In Jed’s Half-Life Model Viewer, click Import texture and select your edited texture.
2. Click on Model Display and see your beautiful artwork.

Placing your new skin in game

1. Click File>Save Model As. A window will appear asking you where you want to save your model. Look in GCFscape to see where the file would normally go and put it there. In this case the model would go C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\<username>\counter-strike\cstrike\models\player\arctic\
2. Open up Counter-Strike to see your new skin in game.

Use this technique on other player models and weapons. With weapons there are three tags: v w p. V is the first person model - you holding the weapon. W is the weapon when it is on the ground. P is the weapon in other players’ hands.

This concludes the skinning tutorial. Feel free to ask questions.

Due to time constraints (working hard on the redesign) you may have noticed that we’ve missed a few updates. Never fear, we’re still here!… in a very rhythmical, unsettling, cliche kind of way. But with that said, we are grinding away on our ’super secret project’ (which will hopefully be out soon).

In the meantime, we’re still looking for solid contributers as I have been very busy as of late. As promised, this site will continue to be updated as frequent as possible and there’s still a lot of work to be done.

We still have a lot of quality articles to pump out, but we need your help! Simply send us a PM on the forums and we’ll give you posting access, if we like what you write, it will be posted, simple as that.

Think you know every secret spot or flash bounce in your favorite map? Write a guide on it. I know most of the articles have been for Source, but we’re looking for help with 1.6 too! This site currently gets over 500-700 unique visitors a day, and has had over 60,000 unique visitors since it’s incarnation. Not bad for a dedicated Counter-Strike site. By posting here you’re helping out all your fellow gamers and giving back to the community. A little recognition goes a long way, a lot of recognition goes ever farther, trust me.

The somewhat infamous hacker named “MaddoxX”, also known as the computer hacker responsible for hacking into one of Valve’s third party billing sites over a year ago, got arrested today. He made claims on many forums during the past year that he could not be caught and that he was only using remote PC’s to power his hacks, thus he believed he was impossible to trace. Too bad for him that it seems he wasn’t so ‘untraceable’ after all. I’m sure he’ll come to regret all the damages he’s caused as he now has some serious explaining to do, most likely in front of a judge. Anyway you can find the full rundown is below.

“A 20 year old hacker was arrested on Tuesday evening in the Dutch town of Maastricht, after the youngster had previously hacked himself into game developers Activision and Valve. The evildoer is being charged and questioned for downloading Activision’s video game Enemy Territory: Quake War whilst it was still in development. Leaking the game would’ve led to estimated damages of 25 million US Dollars. Apart from hacking Activision, the hacker also broke into a third-party site used by Valve to handle the Cyber Café business partner program, which is part of the game distribution network Steam.The man from a country Austin Power’s dad doesn’t like distributed photos of his Valve hack as proof, using the very nerdy pseudonym MaddoxX. As if illegally entering the virtual premises of two game developers weren’t enough, Mr. MaddoxX is also being charged with stealing credit card data of 50.000 customers from an English tickets site. According to the Ministry of the Interior, the hacker managed to burn 13 million Euros playing poker online and shopping for notebooks, flat screens and MP3 players.

A crime unit of the Dutch police called Team High Tech Crime (THTC) was responsible for the bust. The THTC was founded to police networks and communication systems in the Netherlands and tackle crimes using or directed against information and communication technolgy. The THTC is located in the Dutch town of Driebergen.”

If you can read dutch, there’s more coverage here.

As we posted yesterday, new control methods are becoming available… The staff at FPS God has been predicting this type of innovation for a while, but I guess you never know what will/wont stick. What do you think?

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