There seems to be a lot of people confused as to how you get your banner and message of the day to display in game. Since not everyone is at the same level here, I thought I'd make a
very simplified way of getting this done for beginners:
First, let me explain how the banner and MotD (message of the day) are fetched by the server and displayed in game.
On your server in the following directory:
Quote:
/left4dead2/[YOUR IP AND PORT]/left4dead2/left4dead2
You will see a host.txt file and a motd.txt file. These are the files your server uses to pull up the banner (host.txt) and message of the day (motd.txt). If you open these files in Firefox, or simply download them to your desktop and open them, you will see each simply has an html address contained within. If you type this address into Firefox, you will see it pulls up pages with nothing but an image. Specifically, the banner and MotD.
It would be easy if you could simply paste an http image address into the host and motd .txt files , but Steam servers cannot display that in game. It can only direct to an html page. Therefore you need to display the image on a web page, and will need web space.
Go to webs.com and register for a free account. All you need is your banner.jpeg, motd.jpg and two html pages, so any free web host will suffice. Once you've done this, upload both your images and create two new pages, named preferably "banner" and "motd" for simplicity.
We're going to assume you named your banner image "banner.jpg" and your motd image "motd.jpeg". (Mine are named slightly differently, so ignore my image names)
Make sure your two html pages and image files are in the same directory, otherwise you will need to change the path of the image
*Note* You can either rename the index.html page if you want or delete it and create two new pages. Doesn't matter as this is only going to be used for your banner and MotD.
Click to edit your newly created banner and motd html pages. You can delete everything currently written within them and simply paste the following for your banner.html page:
Quote:
<html>
<head><title>Left 4 Dead 411</title></head>
<body style="margin:0px;padding:1px;background:#000000;">
<img src="banner.jpg" style="width:100%;height:100%;" />
</body>
</html>
and the following for your motd.html page:
Quote:
<html>
<head><title>Left 4 Dead 411</title></head>
<body style="margin:0px;padding:1px;background:#000000;">
<img src="motd.jpg" style="width:100%;height:100%;" />
</body>
</html>
Save and close them.
Now you're going to need to replace the host and motd .txt files on your game server. To do this you'll need to access the FTP. You can use any FTP transfer method, I just happen to use FireFTP (Firefox add-on). Connect to your FTP and navigate to the directory mentioned earlier.
Create two new text files using Notepad on your desktop. One named "host" and the other "motd". In your newly created host.txt file paste the address of your "host.html" page and in your newly created motd.txt file paste the address of your "motd.html" page.
*Note* webs.com uses .htm extension instead of .html, so you're pages will end with .htm, not .html
Save them and close.
Upload these files to the proper directory mentioned earlier using the FTP and click yes to overwrite the existing. Restart your server, and your banner and MotD should display.
(If anyone needs help with FTP file transfer just say so and I'll post a quick walkthrough for FireFTP.)
