When I say "Single and Multi-Screen", I am referring to reticles that are normal sized on single-player screens and half-size on split and quad-screen.
Another advantage is that you can re-inject new HUD reticle bitmaps if necessary.
Items Required:
- Any version of Entity (1.3 will be used in this tutorial)
- Notepad, Wordpad, or other word processor to copy down values.
- The Custom [bitm] tag I have supplied
- An image editor like Photoshop
- NVIDIA DDS plugins (Photoshop users only)
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Stage 1) The Bitmap Tag and HUD Links
Most of the bitmaps for the HUD can be either DXT 2/3 or DXT 4/5.
Since the 4/5 format has a more detailed alpha channel, that is the one that I used for the custom bitmap tag.
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Transfer the custom [bitm] i have supplied into your map. It goes by the tag name of ui\hud\bitmaps\new_hud\crosshairs\Sandwich_reticles.
Now go down to the [nhdt] tag list and select the HUD you want the new reticles for and open it in the meta editor. In my case it is the Plasma Pistol.
Scroll through the chunks untill you find the "crosshair" chunk. Once found, scroll down a little till you find the "bitmap" Ident.
Change the "bitmap" Ident to ui\hud\bitmaps\new_hud\crosshairs\Sandwich_reticles.
Change the Fullscreen Sequence to 0 and the Halfscreen and Quarterscreen to 1.
Now repeat the process above on the "crosshair_friend" chunk.
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Optional:
I also intend to have custom reticles for the Plasma Lockon of the Plasma Pistol.
So I will also setup the "crosshair_plasma_tracking" the same way as above except I used 2 and 3 for the Sequence values.
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Test 1) Viewing for Testing and Size Reference
Load up your map to see the bitmaps at work with both Single and Multi-Screen.
I also setup the plasma lockon bitmaps.
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Stage 2) Making and prepping the Reticle bitmaps
The purpose of Test 1) about was to let you get a sense of how big the bitmap is so you can design one to accurate size.
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Go back up to the ui\hud\bitmaps\new_hud\crosshairs\Sandwich_reticles tag and extract the DDS and open it in your choice of editor (Mine being Photoshop CS2).
Now take a look at the DDS I had you extract. First thing you will notice is that the Red, Blue, and Green channels are solid white.
The HUD will only be looking for the alpha channel so leave those color channels solid white, the alpha is what's needed to be edited. So make the reticle completely in the alpha channel.
Once you have finishedsave it as a DDS file with DXT 5 format and no mipmaps just like the example below.
Making a Multi-Screen version of your reticle is simple, just scale you image 50% but maintain the image size of 128x128.
Save it with the same format setting as above but with a different file name.
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Here is my reticle I made for this tutorial. Both single and multi-screen and the corresponding lock-on versions.
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Stage 3) The Reticle Bitmap Injection
Open your map up in Entity, goto the [bitm] tag list and open ui\hud\bitmaps\new_hud\crosshairs\Sandwich_reticles in the meta editor. Since we set submap #0 to be the Full screen reticle, you can just inject the Full Screen reticle now. Then reload the bitmap tag by selecting another tag and selecting our tag again.
Now scroll down to the "Bitmap Data" reflexive, while still in chunk 0, copy down the "LOD1 Offset" and paste it into Notepad.
Now scroll to chunk 1 and copy its "LOD1 Offset" value, scroll back to chunk 0 and paste over the LOD value there. Save and reload the bitmap tag.
Now the second submap bitmap should be showing as default.
Now inject your Multi_Screen bitmap. Reload the bitmap tag.
Go back to the "Bitmap Data" reflexive. Copy that value you saved in Notepad and paste it over the "LOD1 Offset" value in chunk 0. Save and reload the tag once more.
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Open the bitmap in Entity's bitmap viewer and scroll through the submaps to see if you where successful.
Since I also wanted the Plasma Lock-on reticles, I injected those into submaps 2 and 3.
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Finished
I know this was incredibly long and the reticle is rather large but if you followed this as you're supposed to, you should have what it looks like below.
Also please note that you may need to edit the reticle screen location to accommodate different designs. Mine in particular needs to me moved down.
Besides, the reticle can be shrunk down and re-injected anyway.
If you need more than 4 bitmap slots, just clone the [bitm] tag.
