Rotating overlays or decals; how?

Okay, so I'm a newb map maker for Half-Life. I've practically got my
map done, playtested and so forth. This is not a huge issue, but I'd
love to know the answer to it, since it can't really be a Hostage
Rescue map without it.

Yeah you guessed it. It's a CS:S map. A hostage map, to be precised.
Anyway, I'm just trying to place the HRPOINT decal on the ground where,
of course, the rescue point is. Putting it down as a DECAL would be
easy enough, but it's facing the wrong direction, and all I have to do
is rotate it 90degrees to the left to get it looking right. However
after searching through all the menus and this site, I've found no
solution.

Then I found out, hey, Overlays are supposed to be easier. So I tried
that, I rotated it manually; hey, so far so good! But wait... the
texture's on MIRRORED? That's right, instead of it reading "HOSTAGE
RESCUE ZONE", it comes up mirrored, or backwards, "ENOZ EUCSER
EGATSOH", practically. It's DRIVING me insane, because all I have to do
is flip the stupid thing so it can be read right but I can't find that
option anywhere.

What's the simple answer, please, and help me stop yankin' on my hair.
I'm pretty sure I've found it already, I'm probably just missing it.

Maybe try rotating it around with respect to the ground, as in the x-axis (side view) and not from the top (top view)

with overlays you should see U end and U start aswell as V end & V
start. U&V start should be 1.0, change this number to -1.0
that will flip it. My may only have to do -1 in U or V or
both. try it, you dont have to touch any other numbers but the
1.0.

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I seemed to have answered my own question...

<a href="http://luisvault.e-diots.net/images/hl-olay1.JPG" target="_blank"></a>

Okay, so this is what I kept seeing. No matter WHAT I did when I placed
down an overlay, it would always appear mirrored, backwards, whatever.
SO, I started toying around with the properties. Originally, without
messing with it before, the properties of an overlay were U START - "0"
and U END - "1".

<a href="http://luisvault.e-diots.net/images/hl-olay2.JPG" target="_blank"></a>

After toying around with it, I changed U START - "3" and U END - "2",
and... it fixed it. WHY it did, I really don't know why. My knowledge
of Hammer and everything else isn't as vast as most of the pros I've
seen on this site so far. I just map for fun. All I know is that it
fixed it. So if anyone knows what the heck I just did, please feel free
to inform us, (if you feel like it :razz: ).

While I'm at it, for anyone else that had a problem with this, if you
also need to know how to rotate or whatever the overlay, select it,
Tools > Transform at the top, and there you have all the dimensions
you can rotate it to as you see fit. Huzzah.

I swear I checked in that Overlays Tutorial, but I didn't see how
anything like this could be prevented. If it was in there, I certainly
didn't understand it, so, sorry if this was a waste of a post. x.x

EDIT - Ooh, thanks for the responses. :smile: DrGlass, sounds like you were
close to the answer. I tried that as well, but it would just rotate it
(or flip it) through the brush, and wouldn't be visible. Whatever I did
worked. Again, don't know why, but it did. :razz:

U start = 0

U end = -1

that should work just the same. Infact 4 and 3 would work just the same, 0 - (-1) = 1 3 - 2 = 1.

U & V are just another way of saying x & y (only they are
reletive to themselves and not the world) If you texture with any
3d modeling program you will see U & V. I dont really
understand them that much.

Weird. I could've sworn I tried that and I still got it bad.

Well whatever the case, I'm glad I was able to figure it out. :biggrin:

I guess another question is why would it default to something ... wrong? But that's for another time, I s'pose.

I has to do with its position in the world I think. Like you can
put a decal on one side of a wall and have it wrong, then place it on
the other side and have it right. If you want to know more look
up UV mapping.

Thanks a bunch man.. u helped me a ton with this post.. i was killing myself trying to figure out why all my damn texture overlays were freakin mirrored.. thanks =P

Decals (not overlays) pick up their alignment from the base texture of
the face they are applied to. So if you rotate, flip, or scale the
underlying texture, the decal gets transformed too.

For overlays, you use the UV thing.

I did cover this in my tutorial on the topic of overlays.