SS2 Kolya Crosshair

[665c26c997543Kolya]

Tags: °texture °SS2 Change the file extension to .ZIP for unpacking.
These are my crosshairs for SS2. I made 4 different types (Fragile Bombers, Hazard, Simple, Zooming) and tinted them in 4 colours (Amber, Blue, Green and Red). I also added appropriate cursors for Use-Mode.
It goes without saying that you can only use one at a time but with the mod manager you can change them easily at the start of the game.
Below are some screenshots.

// Merely 10 years later I created a few new ones ("Krosshair-...") that are larger, to accommodate for today's higher screen resolutions. And thanks to NewDark we can also use alpha channel transparency now.

[665c26c9978ffSHODANs Hacker]

Seeing no other way I could get the crosshairs and cursors working, I simply overwrote crosshai.pcx and cursor.pcx in res\iface.crf

Do this if You want a near permanent change. (back up the old crosshai.pcx and cursor.pcx)

Great Crosshairs and cursors Kolya

[665c26c997a22Kolya]

Sorry, my mistake. I screwed up the folder structure so they didn't work with Zombe's Mod Manager.
That's fixed now and tested to work.
Thanks for telling me.   

Just curious: Which crosshair did you choose?

Kolya

[665c26c997afcSHODANs Hacker]

Hazard Green. :cool:

[665c26c997c0fKolya]

I just modified the crosshairs. They now identify themselves in Zombe's Modmanager including type and color.
This should make switching crosshairs easier.

Kolya

[665c26c997d0dZeebok]

Nice stuff Kolya     You wouldn't happen to have the cursor in green would you?

[665c26c997e05Kolya]

The original cursor is green. And since my cursors are just recolored versions I didn't make a green cursor.
But I included the original green cursor with every green crosshair just to make sure everything works fine...

Kolya

[665c26c997f09scyphor]

these crosshairs are great, nice work   

[665c26c997ff4Kolya]

Added an invisible crosshair on request. (No invisible cursor, no.)

[665c26c99811eKolya]

Added red versions on request.

[665c26c99828aNameless Voice]

You should add icons to these mods, so that a preview of each crosshair is displayed next to its name in the mod manager.

[665c26c99836aKolya]

Thanks to Nameless who send me the mods updated with icons. The new versions can now be found at the top.

[665c26c998462Fironkkuify]

I think the colors for Amber and Red are exactly the same.  I used Hazard Red for a while and, comparing it to the picture you have posted (where it says Hazard Amber) they look exactly alike. 

[665c26c99854fKolya]

Compare.

[665c26c9986aeFironkkuify]

Alright thanks, just making sure.  They looked very similar -w-;

Is it possible to alter the shading somehow?  Or is System Shock 2 strict in what shadings are allowed?

[665c26c9987e2Kolya]

It's possible and not very hard. Start with a 16x16 pixel image. Paint your cross-hair in it with a hard edged stencil tool using the colours you like. Save it as GIF and make sure that the background colour of your image ends up as the first colour in the palette. That way the game will know this is supposed to be transparent.
If you make a new cross-hair we can post it here or in a thread of its own.

[665c26c99893dFironkkuify]

Well I can try and see what I can do.

Though I'm a little confused as to what you mean by "hard-edged stencil tool" and "making the background color the first one to appear so that it's transparent".

Isn't it possible to do this sort of thing in Paint? 

And aside from the icon picture, there were two other files that be either placed in the iface folder of the ss2 folder (or one could use mod manager to skip that any altering, but those two files still exist). 

[665c26c998a3aNameless Voice]

Paint isn't exactly a proper image editing tool.  You'd be much better off using Photoshop or The Gimp.

[665c26c998bb3Kolya]

The icon is only displayed in the mod manager. It has nothing to do with the actual mod. The real mod files are the textures in the iface folder.

You will need something better than Paint. I suggest the Gimp because it's free.

I mean that the drawing tool should not produce a blurry edge but a hard edge as can be seen in the image above. Looks kinda like 8bit or lack of anti-aliasing, doesn't it? That's because we only have 255 colours available after compression.

Open one of the mod files (eg CROSSHAI.PCX) in the Gimp. Search the Gimp's help for "color palette" and find out how to view and edit the colour palette of CROSSHAI.PCX. You'll see that of the 255 available colour slots in the palette only very few are actually being used. One is the first, which holds the background colour of the image.

[665c26c998cb8Fironkkuify]

Looks like I'll have to get Gimp again.  I'll try and figure it out at some point and make a cool crosshair design.  Thanks for the help -w-

[665c26c998dadSktracket]

Do you plan on making any more crosshair/cursor modifications?

[665c26c998ecdFironkkuify]

IF I can figure it out.  When I got around to trying to edit the crosshair I quickly realized that Kolya was very right; very few colors actually work.  Any other colors only show up as black when applied.

[665c26c998fa7Kolya]

Possibly. Did you have anything in mind?

[665c26c9992d2Fironkkuify]

Possibly. Did you have anything in mind?

How bout a triangle crosshair?  Or a crescent moon?