Next You well want a How-To: Create a TF2 chalkboard style MOTD with HTML easy get it Here

Let just talk about this so it's clear; How-To: Create a TF2 chalkboard style MOTD with HTML.

1. Introduction A lot of server admins want this and we have it: a message of the day (MOTD) that seamlessly fits into the standard Team Fortress 2 chalkboard, but offers a lot more flexibility. Good news: we have decided to share it with you. To better Illustrate what I'm talking about, here is a screenshot of the MOTD when you join our server #2. 2. The Basics You can customize your message of the day through the file motd.txt in the tf directory of your dedicated server folder structure. If this file doesn't exist you can simply create it. Let's start with a simple example and put some text into your MOTD.

Looks pretty and was simple, right? So why would anyone need something else? Well, imagine you would want to put your clan logo into the MOTD. Or maybe you would rather have a two column text layout. Those things can't be achieved with this method.

3. Using HTML The next step is to use HTML in your MOTD. Yes, you can simply put HTML content into the same file and the Source engine will render it using the Internet Explorer engine. So, let's put some basic HTML with some styling into the file and see what happens:

Well, now we have the flexibillity of HTML, but it doesn't look as good as the simple text MOTD. Another drawback is, that the Source server doesn't allow us to link to any external files (e.g. stylesheet or image). So we need a better solution.

3. External HTML One common practise in Counter-Strike: Source was to include a header redirect in the HTML code, so that the ingame browser would load an external file. Though this still works for TF2, it's not necessary, because the Orange Box server allows us to directly specify an external HTML file we want to load. So we edit our motd.txt again and write something like this:

We have created a background image that looks like the default chalkboard, set it so that it would always fill up the whole space and overlay another image with our text above it. So now we can show anything we want in our MOTD. Of course this method has one drawback too: scaling. Since the images have a fixed size, your MOTD will look differently on every screen resolution your clients will use. We have optimized the graphics in a way, that the scaling effects should only be barely visible. If you create your graphics in the same way we did, then you're gonna be fine, because it scales down to 1024x768 without scrolling. This way 98.3% of all Steam gamers will not need a scrollbar, which allows for a nearly seamless transition.

4. What's next? So now that we have the abillity to put anything we want into the MOTD, what could we do next. Well, as you can see in the first screenshot, we have included live server stats. This shows what is currently going on, at our other servers and also shows you what the time left and next map on this server is. You can read how we did this, in our tutorial how to put live server stats into the MOTD.