I'm not sure if there's a less redundant way of doing it, but here's the way I do it.

1) pick your image
2) convert it to a vtf through VTFedit
3) go to your \team fortress 2\tf\materials\console\ folder. if it doesn't exist yet, make the folders
4) move the vtf you made here and make a few copies of it, renaming each one to:

background_2fort_widescreen.vtf
background_gravelpit_widescreen.vtf
background_mvm_widescreen.vtf
background_upward_widescreen.vtf

and you should be done. it feels pretty ugly doing it this way, but it should work just fine

interesting...i'm looking through HUD's and I don't see any calls to a .vtf file. And why .vtf? Such an enigmatic file type. Why not targa or a simple .png? But, thanks m8, I'll try it.

It seems to over-scale all my images. :) But it works!

what resolution are you using?

a strange one, 1152 x 720 on a 16:10 aspect ratio. ;) 15inch macbook pro....i'm sure thats why it's pixelated....what if I didn't rename them _widescreen....?

do you know the name of the halloween bg?

if you look in that file path there should be an image named halloween or like holiday already inside

It's a .vtf (valve texture format) because that's the type of file the game accepts as textures
It isn't used in HUDs because most custom HUDs don't change materials (might stop them working on pure servers). The VanillaTV HUD is an example of one which has custom images which wouldn't work on pure servers.

i dunno. you could try, but i'm also on a 16:10 aspect ratio resolution and _widescreen ones work fine for me. are your images resized correctly beforehand?

looking through the gcf files, it looks like the current halloween bg is named "title_team_halloween2012.vtf" (title_team_halloween2012_widescreen.vtf if you're on a widescreen res)

Yes, I made sure to calculate the size of the 16:10 first...
http://www.silisoftware.com/tools/screen.php
Here's my image...http://imgur.com/6H4my Let me know if it works for you...

This only changed my image for the loading TF2 image. Any idea on how to get it so the wallpaper on the main menu page can be the same picture?

It changed my main menu image. Make sure all your spelling's accurate and no spaces at the beginning of each file

if it's over-scaling or whatever it's not weird considering the image is in a 5:4 ratio

Just checked everything over again. Still not working... :<

ty now my bg is the kawaiiest

http://sphotos-g.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/680385_298574096919227_785014074_o.jpg

I like this quide: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1387346202

https://i.imgur.com/p5VvpDO.png

steam guide
you ease my mind you make everything feel fine...

edit: oh someone already posted the guide

you necro'd a 7 year old thread for this?