Note the first word on this page,,, "Advanced"
That means this text is NOT for newbies!
If you don't want to go through a bit of trouble to improve your gameplay,
then just don't read it ok?
Before you start, Download these tools:
Sprite Generator (44K)
PakExplorer 1.2 (75K)
Sprview (35K)
Simple, | Advanced, | Difficult, | Pro, | |
Just like the simple tutor, you'll need a good palette.
You can extract one from the images to the right > Or simply make one yourself, just be sure to keep the bottom right color the same as displayed in the palettes here > (Since that color & locatoin represent transparency) |
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Now for the advanced stuff.
You should remember this,
Ugly, Big, hard to see, Crappy selection of default Crosshairs, made by some punk at Valve. |
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As you probably noted, those big black areas on the palette are totally unused.
In the halflife\valve\pak0.pak (use pakexplorer)
there are a bunch of textfiles in the "sprites" directory, these textfiles
tell HL how big each
crosshair is, in which spritefile to find it, and the location (dimensions)
of the crosshair to be used.
Here's an example of: weapon_crossbow.txt
Text in red are comments. Number of sprites: This is the number of sprites this texfile calls
upon.
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There are in total 16 of these textfiles. (Including the HUD)
If by chance you fuck up the origonals(or for easy editing), <download
(5K)> them here.
Also be adviced that, in order for these things to work, you cannot
change the name of those textfiles.
With this knowledge you should be able to
redesign the crosshairs.spr Make it use less diskspace (as if 3K matters.) or give more detail to your crosshairs. (Finally!) Or even give each crosshair its own Sprite-File. Here is my first attempt at reduction.
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![]() A difference of 3K with the origonal Valve Crosshairs. |
Ofcourse this is not nearly perfect, right?
I know you can do much better.
But, just to get you started, lets remake the crosshairs.spr again,
this time a bit more severe.
Since the crosshair at position: "0,0 size 24x24" is not used by any
weapon, this one can be deleted,
thus leaving a black space. This way we can make the image even smaller,
and while we are at it,
it would be sort of usefull to sort this thing out a bit.
From left to right:
Pistol, A-Pistol, Magnum, A-Magnum, Zoomed Magnum. Mk-5, A-Mk-5, Shotgun, A-Shotgun, Rpg. Sniper, A-Sniper, Gauss, Gluon, Hornet. Sniper-Zoomed. A-Sniper-Zoomed. |
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Now onto the main thing: Single file crosshairs.
I'm sure you wondered why the hell those crosshairs were all located
in the same file, right?
I shall now show you how to get rid of that, very easily. (These textfiles
RULE)
Unlike the all in 1, crosshair file, you can make
each crosshair have its own sprite file. This enables easyer editing / replacing crosshairs. And it saves you the trouble of having to make a complete crosshair pack, each time you get tired of your old ones. Each crosshair will thus need to be given its own QC-file, and BMP-file. then it needs to be compiled to a SPR-file, and in the TXT-file you will finally have to tell halflife what you did. Sounds difficult? |
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I figure you can think up how long it took me to get it working....
And to save you the trouble, here you go:
<Pro-Crosshair-pack (65K)>
(sprgen.exe, standard HL-crosshairs and TKi-pack5 Included)
That just about rounds up the advanced tutorial,
if i find out anything more i'll let y'all know.