Crosshairs for the Visually Impaired

Black Mesa Archive In-game Issues (Mod)
#1

OK, it’s not that bad. I made it all the way to Surface Tension without issues. But once I was on the surface, surrounded by bright lights and yellow terrain… I couldn’t see my crosshairs anymore, except for the shotgun and it’s big funky circle.

At 1600x900, with bright backgrounds, I can’t see single pixels, not at any color (I’ve tried a few).

I tried a few things in console but no luck. I took a peek around the textures, but not even sure where to look.

As a graphic designer, I love the minimalism… as a glasses wearing Linux admin, I’d like to have the option for something a little thicker :smiley:

Is there a way to replace the crosshairs with something a little more high contrast? Even if I have to make some textures myself in The Gimp I’d be happy.

#2

I am visually impaired myself and think this is important to consider, a sizeable chunk of gamers don’t have perfect sight and need some small scale options to play at the same level as others. I am not even in Office Complex yet so I haven’t had problems seeing the crosshair in the dark corridors of the facility, but I do worry when I will reach the surface. I play at 1920x1080 so the crosshair is extremely small.

Is there perhaps a crosshair scale cvar in the game?

#3

Being visually impaired myself, I can definitely say that being able to choose a thick green colored crosshair in Team Fortress 2 helps greatly. :slight_smile: Having a similar option in Black Mesa would be useful, especially once I try beating the game on ‘Hard’ difficulty, or if Deathmatch comes around.

#4

If the colour was inverted instead of being a solid colour, the crosshairs will always stand out.

Also, you could put tape on your screen.

#5

Naw, the problem isn’t color, mostly. The biggest problem is the design of the crosshair for the MP5, in particular, but many of the other crosshairs.

Even during Surface Tension, I could make out the pistol crosshair, as it’s nice and thick. The problem with the MP5 cross hair is that it’s five single dots. Even in dark scenes, during battle, I was having to lean really, really close to my screen in order to find the crosshair in order to shoot with it. More often than not, I either just (1) made do with the Glock, which I could see, or (2) shot, looked for the pockmarks, moved, shot again, looked for the pockmarks, moved, rinse, lather, repeat.

The circular crosshairs for shotgun and nuclear weapons were perfect; they were thick and always visible. During the noise of battle, though, it was too easy to lose the other crosshairs.

So, I would either like (1) the ability to turn on thick circular crosshairs for all weapons, or (2) a guide on how to turn the game’s crosshairs into thick, circular crosshairs.

I’d rather not have to put tape on my laptop flat panel just to use a single weapon in a single game.

#6

I couldn’t find an option to make the crosshair thicker (yet), but I found a way to change both its color(s) and opacity (alpha).

How-To find the lines (CVars) we need:

[i]

  1. Browse to this location: “…\SteamApps\sourcemods\BMS\cfg…”.
  2. Open “config.cfg” with a text-editor (Notepad++ or a similiar software would be optimal).
  3. Hit “Ctrl + F” on your keyboard, to search through the contents of the file.
  4. Type in “crosshair_color” (without “”) and hit ENTER.

[/i]

You should see something like this, if the search found what you specified in the “Ctrl + F Dialog”:

Important-Note: I selected lines of interest (hence the gray overlay on 4 of these lines).

How to proceed:

[i]

  1. Change the lines to your liking (a few examples can be found below).
  2. Save and close the file once you’ve made your (valid) changes to the CVars (e.g. crosshair_color_red “123”).
  3. Test the new crosshair in-game.

[/i]

Examples (Default and Default [inverted]):

[COLOR=’#FFAA00’]Default (HTML: “#FFAA00”):

crosshair_color_red "255"
crosshair_color_green "170"
crosshair_color_blue "0"

[COLOR=’#0055FF’]Default [inverted] (HTML: “#0055FF”):

crosshair_color_red "0"
crosshair_color_green "85"
crosshair_color_blue "255"

Examples (Standard colors [RGB, etc.]):

[COLOR=’#FF0000’]Red (HTML: “#FF0000”):

crosshair_color_red "255"
crosshair_color_green "0"
crosshair_color_blue "0"

[COLOR=’#008000’]Green (HTML: “#008000”):

crosshair_color_red "0"
crosshair_color_green "255"
crosshair_color_blue "0"

[COLOR=’#0000FF’]Blue (HTML: “#0000FF”):

crosshair_color_red "0"
crosshair_color_green "0"
crosshair_color_blue "255"

[COLOR=’#000000’]Black (HTML: “#000000”):

crosshair_color_red "0"
crosshair_color_green "0"
crosshair_color_blue "0"

[COLOR=’#FFFFFF’]White (HTML: “#FFFFFF”):

crosshair_color_red "255"
crosshair_color_green "255"
crosshair_color_blue "255"

Examples (Extra Colors):

[COLOR=’#808080’]Gray (HTML: “#808080”):

crosshair_color_red "128"
crosshair_color_green "128"
crosshair_color_blue "128"

[COLOR=’#FF00FF’]Magenta (HTML: “#FF00FF”):

crosshair_color_red "255"
crosshair_color_green "0"
crosshair_color_blue "255"

[COLOR=’#7FFF00’]Chartreuse (HTML: “#7FFF00”):

crosshair_color_red "127"
crosshair_color_green "255"
crosshair_color_blue "0"

[COLOR=’#00FFFF’]Cyan (HTML: “#00FFFF”):

crosshair_color_red "0"
crosshair_color_green "255"
crosshair_color_blue "255"

You may want to play around with both the color and alpha / opacity (crosshair_color_alpha “X”), to find the kind of crosshair you like best.

Note: I’ll browse through some of the files and see if I can possibly find a way to change the thickness or the overall appearence entirely, as well.

If you have any questions, ask them! :slight_smile:

Enjoy!

Note 2: Excuse the long post, by the way - was just trying to cover a variety of colors here… :wink:

Note 3: Feedback regarding the practical validity of this “tutorial” would be nice, too.

In other words: Does it work? If not, did you follow the tutorial step-by-step? Are the lines you changed valid (0-255 are working values)? Ecetera.

#7

Hmm…later on I’ll try this, although I’m confident it’ll work flawlessly if done correctly. Team Fortress 2 also has a tab in the Options window that allows the customisation of both crosshair colour and type, even allowing custom ones to be added by adding crosshair files to the steam directory.
Perhaps the BM devs can include this as part of/after finishing the Xen/multiplayer aspect of BMS, it’s a hectic piece of work; well worth the eight-year wait!

#8

Just tested “Cyan” in-game and I can confirm that it definitely works, if done correctly (screenshot will follow in a short while) - like you said.

I’m still trying to find a way to increase / decrease thickness, etc. …

EDIT (13 : 33): Here’s a screenshot (scaled down from 1920x1080 to 800x450 [here I used the ‘Cyan’ setting, I posted earlier]):

Except for downscaling the image, no changes were made. The crosshair appears exactly like this in-game and it has not been post-edited or “faked”.

#9

I think this cannot be done that easily (but I might be totally wrong).

AFAIK there is a true type font named blackmesa.ttf which contains the hud elements. You need a True Type editor to change the crosshairs.

But as said, I am not sure.

#10

It could be an optional mod for Black Mesa that makes the crosshairs bigger and thicker by replacing that ttf file, unfortunately I have no experience with such editing myself.

Oh, and thank you very much for that colour guide, Jenova. I will definitely make use of it if I start running into problems seeing the crosshairs.

#11

Thanks for the feedback!

Be sure to ask any color you want and I’ll add it to the examples section, as soon as possible. :smiley:

#12

Hello, it’s not in the font. The crosshairs appear to be the textures located at:

\steamapps\sourcemods\BMS\materials\VGUI\hud

For example, my bane is located in crosshair_mp5.vtf.

I tried editing the texture with Gimp and VTFedit, converting it to a thicker version of itself (three pixel thick dots instead of 1) but it didn’t seem to save ingame. Don’t know if I’m missing something here, as I’ve never modded textures before.

(Ironically, after trying out a whole bunch of different colors, to my eyes, the best color was… default orange. Go figure. I still couldn’t see it, but I couldn’t see it better than I couldn’t see all the other colors. :smiley: )

#13

There must be something that controls the size of the crosshairs in the .res files or scripts.
In HL2 we could add an outline to the crosshairs by editing the clientscheme.

Also the 357 crosshair isnt even centered. The glock looks funky too.

#14

In BMS/Scripts folder there is a HudLayout.res file(which you can open with notepad). There’s a section called CHudCrosshair, with some parameters in it. There are no references to scale in any of them… would it be possible to add some by my own? I just don’t know which commands would do the trick, wouldn’t increasing the base scale just make the reticule wider and inaccurate?

I tried editing the crosshair.vtf files too but the game won’t note any changes in them. It’s as if those files are there just for nothing. I tried some commands in game to reload all the files affiliated with the game but nothing happens.

It says in the black mesa wiki that crosshairs are font-driven and easily customizable… is that entirely true? I love the mod very much, but when I reached the surface, I was hard time having my crosshair on some weapons.

#15

I did try the .vtf thing myself, using Paint.NET and the corresponding VTF-Plugin, but whatever I did to the files, they just wouldn’t appear in-game (once I added an X to the shotgun crosshair -> in-game it’s still a regular circle).

I’d assume it has something to do with the way the files are compressed after editing, so if the game detects that a file it’s about to load has not been properly compressed, it just loads its default file from somewhere else.

I tried to just rename certain files (for example, I like the shotgun crosshair, but want to have it on all weapons, so I copy & pasted the crosshair_shotgun.vtf and crosshair_shotgun.vmt files to a remote location, renamed them and pasted them back into the VGUI folder.), but still - it wouldn’t accept the changes, whatsoever (rendering the assumption that it could have something to do with the way the file is compressed while saving obsolete - I’m guessing it has something to do with a CVar or something similiar, that defines custom crosshairs / disables an “AlwaysLoadDefault” value, etc.

…or it could be something entirely different - that the .vtf and .vmt files are just resources (much like the core programming of the options panel correlates to its corresponding .res files), so said file’s attributes are handled elsewhere, for instance…

This is just an assumption, I don’t insist on any of these theories being true (the Devs would probably know).

Adding different values and variables to the “CHudCrosshair” section in “HudLayout.res” didn’t help, either.

The values / variables I tried (code examples):

Adding “wide” and “tall” ->

CHudCrosshair
{
	"fieldName"			"CHudCrosshair"
	"textAlignment"			"center"
	"paintbackground"		"0"
	"brighttext"			"1"
	"centerwrap"			"1"
	"wide"				"3"
	"tall"				"3"
}

Adding “scale” ->

CHudCrosshair
{
	"fieldName"			"CHudCrosshair"
	"textAlignment"			"center"
	"paintbackground"		"0"
	"brighttext"			"1"
	"centerwrap"			"1"
	"scale"				"3"
}

Adding “size” ->

CHudCrosshair
{
	"fieldName"			"CHudCrosshair"
	"textAlignment"			"center"
	"paintbackground"		"0"
	"brighttext"			"1"
	"centerwrap"			"1"
	"size"				"3"
}

It could be that I’m just using the wrong keywords / values / variables, so there could still be a possibility that something like “XXX_scale” would potentially work…

While browsing through a few of those files, one of them seemed “suspicious” relatively quick, as well:

gameui_english.txt

Note: This is (by far) not the file’s entire content, but a tiny, very interesting section.

"GameUI_CrosshairDescription"	"Crosshair appearance"
"GameUI_Auto"			"Auto-size"
"GameUI_Small"			"Small"
"GameUI_Large"			"Large"
"GameUI_Translucent"		"Translucent"

"GameUI_CrosshairRed"	"Red"
"GameUI_CrosshairGreen"	"Green"
"GameUI_CrosshairBlue"	"Blue"
"GameUI_CrosshairScale"	"Size"

The “gameui_english.txt” file is a localization file, to make the text “dynamic” (if you change your language, the text “adapts” using pre-defined variables (text), so a button reads “Avbryt” (Swedish) instead of “Cancel”).[/SIZE]

My guess would be that the Devs are already working on a feature, similiar to the “Multiplayer” section we know from TF2 or CSS, with the option to change the overall appearance of our crosshairs (maybe even the HUD), from inside the game’s option panels - which could be the reason why the above section is already inside the released files.

Said feature could be implemented with the next (major) update.

Note: Yes, I do realise that the team is probably working on this update, already. :slight_smile:

#16

Thank you for the reply, you have good points and insight there. After playing a lot of the valve source games, I think Left 4 Dead(1 at least) has very effective way of customizing crosshair in console. I was able to make it very visible(red) and thick.

I doubt this update will come before I have played black mesa through, but I found somewhat nice way to adjust the crosshair color. Since numpads are unused, it’s a good idea to bind various crosshair color settings into them.

E: I clean this reply up a bit. I managed to bind some colors into keypad buttons. Here’s the bind commands for each, having some basic color combinations. (Feel free to change of course!)

bind kp_end “crosshair_color_red 255;crosshair_color_green 0;crosshair_color_blue 0”
bind kp_downarrow “crosshair_color_red 0;crosshair_color_green 255;crosshair_color_blue 0”
bind kp_pgdn “crosshair_color_red 0;crosshair_color_green 0;crosshair_color_blue 255”
bind kp_leftarrow “crosshair_color_red 255;crosshair_color_green 255;crosshair_color_blue 0”
bind kp_5 “crosshair_color_red 255;crosshair_color_green 255;crosshair_color_blue 255”
bind kp_rightarrow “crosshair_color_red 0;crosshair_color_green 255;crosshair_color_blue 255” (cyan, I also like this)
bind kp_home “crosshair_color_red 255;crosshair_color_green 0;crosshair_color_blue 255”
bind kp_uparrow “crosshair_color_red 0;crosshair_color_green 0;crosshair_color_blue 0”

I’m not an expert at these things but I hope someone finds this somewhat helpful.

#17

Binding different crosshair settings to keys (especially the numpad keys) is a really nice idea, to be honest!

If you’re having problems with seeing the crosshair and thus what / where you’re shooting at (or trying to), you could just hit the NUMPAD1 key and be done with it -> voila, your crosshair has changed from the default orange to a bright green (or something similiar), ecetera.

You could have a brighter crosshair setting for dark rooms on one key, a default crosshair setting for relatively well lit rooms and a “darker” crosshair setting for very bright rooms on two other keys.

This may be the most effective (and simple) way to change the crosshair settings (at least color and opacity) on the fly / in-game, until an update implements said features, of course.

#18

You are best usign vtf editor tfrom “nemstools” I edited the 357 magnum corsshair so it is centered now :slight_smile:
open the vtf in the editor export as tga then edit the tga in your paint program then import it back into vtfeditor.
you have to marry the “import settings” up with what the old one uses.

https://nemesis.thewavelength.net/index.php?c=238#p238

This is what I was meaning. I added the secodn layer so can see the pixels.
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/30326465/Black%20Mesa/pics/offcentre.jpg

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/30326465/Black%20Mesa/pics/centre.jpg

#19

I couldn’t get it working, inside the vtf editor it showed the same exact things as with the original file though. Is there anything I should know about the import options and are all of the crosshairs using the same settings?

This is not a very big deal for me though, cyan color works for me too, in most situations.

#20

Hello. Any fix for the MP5’s reticule? Like you guys I find it really hard to score hits with this weapon. In long-range firefights, I’ve restored to using the pistols.

This is a major flaw in an awesome game.

Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.