[SUGGESTION] How about some new crosshairs?

Hi there, been lurking around nexuiz for years and I used to play off and on and now that Xonotic is here, I hope that I can perhaps contribute to what *should* become a more successful game for the community.

One thing I would like is maybe more variety of crosshairs. It seems to me that Nexuiz is very limited on this and there are a few good crosshairs while others are un-useful copies of the same one. As a UT player I'm used to having atleast 20 different stock crosshairs to choose from, as well as a ton of crosshair packs.

So I ask atleast if anyone is interested, to have one of the best crosshairs made for the original UT99 by a community modder, be used for Xonotic. It is actually only slightly different then one of the crosses in Nexuiz but I believe it to be 'ideal' in every sense, and many of the veteran players including myself used it forever. It's called teardrop and below is the picture. It's basically 4 exclamation marks with some rounded edges and faded near the end of the line next to the dots, to form a cross.

Right now the menu part about crosshairs is a bit too static, so it would not play well with crosshair packs, but maybe thats easy to "fix".

More crosshairs would be nice to have and as long as they are GPL i think there is no problem with including them in Xonotic. To make sure they are they either already need to be GPL'd or you need to own the copyright on them and licence them as GPL..
Can't view that image right now, but i already found my perfect crosshair.. dot with circle around it, preferable with two colors

In addition, the current cross-hairs seem to be too low resolution. Seeing they are only simple shapes, it shouldn't be too hard to make new ones in one of dem vector drawing programs (like Inkscape) based on the current ones or new concepts.

The current CHs (at least the general ones.. not sure bout the per-weapon ones) are 24x24 pixels. I guess if they were redone, one should redo all of them with the same size so that ones can switch among them and does not need to adjust the size each time. As there are some single and dual color CHs with the same shape, guess the single colored ones could be dropped too.

The current CHs (at least the general ones.. not sure bout the per-weapon ones) are 24x24 pixels. I guess if they were redone, one should redo all of them with the same size so that ones can switch among them and does not need to adjust the size each time. As there are some single and dual color CHs with the same shape, guess the single colored ones could be dropped too.

This explains why they look so pixelly I agree the size should be consistent for all CHs. Would 256x256 be enough for this?

contest!

Is it very difficult to integrate a possibility to great everybodys own crosshair?

like a little box with a raster (24x24 pixels or better more) and you just pick a colour and then point (with the mouse erm. ) on the place on the raster where you wanna have the color.

Personallized crosshair (possibility) for every player would be a nice feature.

cya hf

eh !

I'm not sure if thats possible.. the engine comes with a handful of building CH images but otherwise needs "real" image files to use other crosshairs.

Can see your CH now xios, well done but at least quite bad for my personally. the dots kinda distract me and i really miss something in the middle for 'pin point accuracy'.. others ofc might like it

New...and higher resolution crosshairs would be a blessing!

Right now the menu part about crosshairs is a bit too static, so it would not play well with crosshair packs, but maybe thats easy to "fix".

An easy fix I suggest would be to have a menu that allows you to scroll through crosshairs and then just have one large preview box that changes as you go from crosshair to crosshair, instead of trying to fit them all on the screen at once.

More crosshairs would be nice to have and as long as they are GPL i think there is no problem with including them in Xonotic. To make sure they are they either already need to be GPL'd or you need to own the copyright on them and licence them as GPL..
Can't view that image right now, but i already found my perfect crosshair.. dot with circle around it, preferable with two colors

This crosshair I ul'ed I actually smoothed out, made larger near the center, and brightened in photoshop. The original is from a freely released community xhair pack from back in 2001. If I changed mine from the original and publically display it and say it's GPL, I would hope that should be enough to use it.

Below is an exact replica of the original from g1bhairz4 by G1BZ

This crosshair I ul'ed I actually smoothed out, made larger near the center, and brightened in photoshop. The original is from a freely released community xhair pack from back in 2001. If I changed mine from the original and publically display it and say it's GPL, I would hope that should be enough to use it.

I am not a lawyer (ianal..) but "freely released" does not sound very GPLy, as it would mean the author owns the copyright and just allowed people to USE it. So one would have to look at the licence of that xhair pack.

However a crosshair does not have a very high "inventive ingenuity" and maybe one can convert about any crosshair as "there are hardly any other ways to draw them". Similar to that "usually 10 lines of code" can't be written any other way, thus its save to use them..

Certainly I don't see it as having much, if any, inventive ingenuity and I believe freely released and free-to-use should be applicable so long as the authors are credited if such xhair is truly "unique" or "inventive". Any and every fps has crosshairs that are an adaptation or the same as a crosshair from any other game. Several of the xhairs in nexuiz have already been in other games for years. The dot with a large circle around it has been around forever and is already used in games like UT and Quake, which are two separate companies. Who decided it was GPL and/or the license of it? I really think it's a non-issue. And ZaGhost's site doesn't provide any information about a license/copyright claim. It would be just the same if I were to make an xhair and release it as part of an xhair pack as I have done already, (see #52-58 in the fftunes xhair pack for UT2004, you'll see my name in the credits as S3Y3N). There was no "license" or "copyright" stated so I'm not sure where copyright was claimed on them, other than the authors or adaptations being mentioned in credits. I could make any variation of teardrop and I don't believe there is enough inventive value to lay claim on it. It's like that coffee company that tried to sue because another company put the same brown stripes along the bottom of their cup and it failed to hold up in court. I think trying to pursue the author of an original xhair from 10 years ago on an abandoned site would be difficult, and or fruitless. Why not just use the one I made in Photoshop which is a variation of his if you're that concerned about it?

I draw the "circle with dot" myself in gimp and licenced it gpl, without ever loading the "original q3 crosshair image", so it should be pretty safe. Especially given the thing that there is no other way to do that particular SIMPLE crosshair.

In general its a bad idea to "copy a image file" if one is not sure that its GPL compatible. In such a case redoing it from scratch as i did should be preferred just to be safer (as it then WILL vary at least in some parts and could constitute a work of its own..). Sure its very very unlikely that a author or such a old crosshair will claim a copyright violation but a good part about this whole licensing stuff is JUST TO BE SAFE.. Like if you do not mind such potential problems in the small, its likely that one also does not mind them in the big, and that would be bad press for such a big opensource project. I also see that it can annoy people, sorry for that, but its part of keeping a project healthy. And there are persons way more an*l about it then i am

Also generally speaking a author "automatically" gets a copyright on any work he creates (even without specifically mentioning a license/copyright) which basically puts him into control of what happens to his work. So in general this IS imcompatible with GPL as GPL grants several freedoms. Redoing a similar work for scratch should again be safe. (Ignoring things like trademarks and such as to not complicate matters too much..)
On top of that.. i'm not totally sure how things works when it involves public domain stuff, which COULD be what we have with those crosshairs.

I think trying to pursue the author of an original xhair from 10 years ago on an abandoned site would be difficult, and or fruitless. Why not just use the one I made in Photoshop which is a variation of his if you're that concerned about it?

Yeah that should be safe, for a good part i was only speaking about the matter in general and honesty i might have missed that part were you said YOU did it.. or i have gone over it with the generallity of my stuff. Sorry for that.

I can try and convert the current crosshairs into vector files, if such files don't already exist.

do not think so.. Check the misc repository to be sure

All I managed to find is two files, one in xcf and the other in psd. Where can I find the crosshairs used in game?

maybe there are no more.. As they are quite simple. Also the first 7 or so are engine buildin. you can only find them in some .c file

Found them. I needed to scroll down more. Also, they're in the data pk3.

Hey All,

I stumbled across the site today after a random google search to see if anyone was still using my UT x-hairs....

I noticed your copyright questions....

All of the files on my site were used with permission from the owners, or the owners sent them to me for posting. So they were released free intom to community as freeware. I don't see any liscensing issues at all if you were to use any of them. I think giving credit to the author would be all that warranted.

Take care, and good luck with the project

ZaGhost

I was thinking of some new crosshairs too so I started this [THREAD]