There are many tools and programs that are useful for working with hud files. While none are strictly necessary, they will either make your life significantly easier or enable you to do things you otherwise couldn't.
For the most part, you can use any text editor you want, as long as it's not notepad (notepad does not handle line endings very well, and lacks many features useful in hud development).
Here are some commonly recommended alternatives that are good for working with hud files:
- Notepad++: https://notepad-plus-plus.org/
- VS Code: https://code.visualstudio.com/
- Atom: https://atom.io/
- Sublime: https://www.sublimetext.com/
For the majority of hud editors, Notepad++ is fine.
Vpk files are the file format that all tf2 files are stored with. They can be opened with GCFScape, and are treated like an archive file (similar to .zip or .rar files). It can be downloaded here:
There are two options for working with vtf files, the image format used for textures in tf2.
The easier option is to use the vtf plugins for popular editors. Here they are:
- Paint.net: https://nemstools.github.io/pages/Miscellaneous-PDN_VTF_Plug-In.html
- Photoshop: https://nemstools.github.io/pages/Miscellaneous-PS_VTF_Plug-In.html
The longer, but more flexible approach is to use VTFEdit to convert into and out of the vtf format. You can use any image editor with this, but you will need to save the files then convert them separately. VTFEdit Reloaded is recommended as it has many advantages over the original VTFEdit. They can be downloaded here:
- VTFEdit Reloaded: https://github.com/Sky-rym/VTFEdit-Reloaded/releases/latest
- VTFEdit : https://nemstools.github.io/pages/VTFLib-Download.html
Relatively few hud editors will edit their own fonts. But it can be a valuable skill and there are some creative techniques that require custom fonts.
Because fonts will be either ttf or otf files, which are completely standard formats, you can use your choice of font editing software. Some good free options are:
- fontforge: https://fontforge.github.io/en-US/
- birdfont: https://birdfont.org/
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