Baldo's New M60 Sight
 

Check it out in the attachment.

Scott had a pre-coffee spam delete-athon a while ago and nuked a thread I had started about a sight I found in the DFBHD demo and other sights I make for DFBHD. He PMed his regrets to me and I told him, in effect, oh boy, howdy, I know how he feels, and that I'd try to recreate the thread.

Today, I start that attempt.

In the research I did on red dot sights and ACOG reticles and all manner of bullet drop compensator opticals, I came across a blueprint for the 1-8x24F1 Taci reticle, and you can't give me that level of detailed information and not expect me to do some photoshopping. The absurdity of the idea!

The targa illustrated in the attached .png is what I'm optimistically calling the pre-final version, but only 'cause I think a little reshading on those dark spots would make it less eldritch, an adjective so out of place for a description of combat optical sights that you'll probably remember it for three whole days instead of the usual forgotten after the next nap.

I like naps, man. No more than any randomly selected Gen-X metalhead, no, but I like knowing I've stated the fact somewhere.

Is that called manifesting?

Edit: Tweaked the shading and repositioned the base targa a bit. I think I'm done with this. For now.

Nice work!

I really wish I could make it clear how I barely know what I'm doing in Photoshop, yet look at the results. But considering the original NL M60 sights (*wink), it's literally better than nothing.

More attachments below.

This happy accident:

I'll PM details of my test map (and the map, and the TSDIcon.tga I created it to test) to anyone wanting them, but the summary of the attached screenshot is that there are barbed wire fence posts 509m south of where I'm prone, set a distance apart from each other so that they are as close to 10 mils as I could get them. You can see that the large divisions on my Taci reticle crosshair align with them perfectly. The red horseshoe is about 20 mils on the outside, about 15 mils on the inside, and the dot's about 2.5 mils. Or as close as you can get at resolution 1024×768

I did not do this on purpose, so I won't break my arm patting myself on the back, but I think this is neat.

Latest screenshots. I might be done with the M60 sight.

Basically tweaked some of the shading on the sight part and redid the M60 part, there were some highlights I felt needed lowering.

I'm having good fun with it.

Wow! Really, the textures on the sight look stunning in comparison with the rest of the environment. It's like putting low-res and high-res next to each other. Good work! You could almost give the entire game a new look if you would have the needed support :hail:. Maybe you could be our salvation to a new series in the DF since Nova has gone dark? :dontknow:

Long story short, looks good and I hope we can use it if your planning to release a modd?

By the way, I've bought a Cat..it's an addictive love.. How's your grieve?

It's dark for me some days, Snipes, it's dark. I don't think I'll ever really get over it, but I'm managing. Thanks for asking.

Blaze has been doing some DFBHD modding, I've been helping him, and I got inspired by the work, but his vision has no room for the optical M60 sight. He liked the iron sights better. They ain't bad. Might need a tweak or two. See the attached .jpg.

The .zip attached contains the M60 optical sight targas and a .txt copy of the WPN_M60 weapon.def entry with the values I like. Includes a commented-out hudrndgfx line for clipsize 200. I wish you all joy of it.

And why is no one answering to my issues?
Sorry for off topic.

Your screenshots are helpful, but we cannot diagnose a sysdump if you don't tell us everything that was going on when it happened. My experience with sysdumps mostly involve badly written .wac files, buggy mods, corrupted maps, or pure random bull****. It could be anything. Go back to that thread you started and tell us more.

The Bink .dll error might be fixed by opening the dfv.cfg in notepad.exe, finding the line no_anim and changing it from -1 or 0 to 1. That seems to deactivate the Bink videos. I'm going to copy-paste those sentences into your thread.

I'll shamefully admit, I saw your sysdump screenshot earlier, saw no other info, and left no comment out of frustration. I didn't even look at the other screen shot 'til now 'cause I figured it was the same as the other one.

You have to communicate, people! DFBHD is a buggy mess, and we need clues to find the culprit, even if it's always an old man in a monster suit trying to steal something.

So you redraw the alpha from the ground up, leave the texture a little dark, and go with a 0.5 pixel gaussian blur instead of the usual 1px, you get a screenshot like the attached.

Apparently, I can't leave it alone. Fake ACOG reticle, colored green. See attachment.

The trouble with ACOG reticles in DBHFD is that they require at least 4x, optimally 6x magnification to get enough resolution to draw the bullet drop compensator. Editing a weapon to be scoped can get you some magnification (Note: in DBHFD, setting scope_max_mag to 5 is actually 6x, 10 is actually 12x), but the game forces you to use the sniper scope crosshair (which is mounted high and left) so you can't use an ACOG reticle, fake or not.

Editing a weapon to be sighted will allow you to add your FAKE-OG reticle, but sighted gives you 1.33 magnification, and a 600m BDC at this magnification would be about 4 pixels tall.

I like playing around with FAKE-OG reticles, though.

I don't know. I guess this is stupid, but it was a fun little excercise in tracing a screencap. Not 1:1 tracing, but...

It's not the exact color 'cause the BF2042 shade of reticle orange doesn't interpret well into DFBHDTS the way I was using it, so it'd need more tweaking, and I'm just fooling around with this at the moment.

Part of this exercise in ripping off BF2042 is my past experience having trouble getting reticles of certain colors to render well in DBHFDTS so that they're useful in all lighting conditions. I've learned some things with this trick.

See attached collage of my latest round of tweaks. Note the fairly well-matched shade of pinkish orange to the BF2042 original.

Oh look, more FAKE-OG reticles.

It's spreading to other games!

Without fail, if I play CS: Condition Zero long enough, I'll get sick of the bots' suspicious effectiveness against me as opposed to my bot teammates, and Madman sniping me in the head from the other end of the map with his ridiculous Mac-10 skills, even though I have two keys dedicated to executing bot_kill.cfg files that end every bot on any map I happen to get sick of waiting for the next round to start on, but I still did a thing you can observe in the attached screenshot.

Please note that the four lines coming out of the edge of the scope are not mine, seem to be permanently hardcoded into CSCZ, and I did my best to work around them.

Another BF2042 reticle rip-off. It's pretty close, and I tried a new trick on this one, 'cause a nice, smooth chevron 9px wide and 5px high is easy. 9px wide and 4px high can look a bit blobby if you're not careful. I think I got something useful out of the experiment, though.

See attachments for evidence.

This one is mostly useless and inauthentic, but it looks great.

The inside of the center ring is 1 degree, which is a little less than man-height at 100m. The rangefinder is for 80m, 60m, 40m, and 20m, so it's pretty much a joke, but it's a fairly accurate one. The crosses are arbitrarily placed, and about half a degree in size, but the lowest one is actually area-accurate at 3600m, which is not significant for anything but one map that I have. I wish I did that on purpose, but it was coincidental.

The thing about sights vs scopes in DFBHD is that weapons edited to be sighted ADS at a fixed magnification of around 1.25x, and the G36 reticle needs at least 4x to be functional (ACOGs have the same problem). Of course, you can get 4x if you edit the weapon to be scoped, but then you can't use custom reticles. All the documentation I could find states the inside of the center ring on the G36 reticle is supposed to be 1.75m wide at 400m. A man-height-at-400m-inner-ring diameter at 1.25x magnification is about 3.6 pixels at 1024x768 game resolution (my preference 'cause that's DFBHD's HUD layout resolution). I did what I could with this reticle, though. I don't hate it.

Personally, I think this reticle obscures the target at distance more than I like, and I might try to fix that another time, but it's kind of fun for now. The illumination might be a bit too dim at the moment, too.

We'll see.

.PNG screenshots for clarity.

Update on the G36B Special Reticle: I'm going with this (see attachment).

Edit: Updated again. Essentially, removed the top half of the center ring and crosshair, and made the illumination brighter. Strange, but effective.

Working up a thing for the PSG-1 in the SFOD mod.

The conundrum explained:

The PSG-1 is the civilian/police model, and Wikipedia says it's standard with a Hensoldt 6x42 scope. I wanted to work up an authentic looking crosshair, but the best I can google, the 6x42 reticle is a bit meh. The 4x24 looks pretty practical, though, and I drew up something like it.

Due to NeverLogic's thing for three-quarter assing stuff, the magnification is not what they call it. When the HUD says 4x mag., it's not that things look 4x times larger through the scope, it's that they reduced the field of view to 25%. So the default horizontal FOV in NL games, screen edge to screen edge, is 80°, and a NL 4x zoom is 20°. Compare screenshots of something through the 4x and not through the 4x, you'll find 4x is actually 4.77x mag.

By coincidence impossible to account to NL's competence, 5x zoom in NL games is close enough to actual 6x magnification that I'm comfortable stating it baldly: 5x zoom is 6x mag. insofar as, at 5x zoom, things look 6x larger. Savvy?

Now the conundrum: do I mod the PSG-1 to have 6x zoom for 7.15 mag., or do I give it 5x zoom for an authentic 6x mag.? I prefer the latter and drew the horizon divisions accordingly, so at 5x zoom, the space between a tall hash and a short one is man-width at 100m. I like useful designs, you know?

Going with 6x zoom/7.15x mag. would mean redesigning the crosshairs, and I rather not, but I could.

Check out the screenshot attached.

Attached: My Mark 1 grenade-drop compensator reticle for the M4/M203 in the SFOD mod.

Lab-condition testing leaves very little to desire for accuracy. Play testing is pending.

It's a work in progress. I like it.

Edit: New version with FAKE-OG support. Isolated the aimpoint a bit more for less confusion.

I think this might be the final design. Maybe.

The chevron is zeroed at 100m. It's as wide as a target at 100m, shoulder to shoulder (19", or 48.26cm for us in civilization [the math says 6.8 pixels]), and it's as tall as a 1.7m target at 300m (although, working with the resolutions I'm dealing with, the math made it clear that targets of any height between 1.7m and 1.8m will give me a chevron height of a bit more or a bit less than 8 pixels).

I'm enjoying it so far.

You might be wondering what's the point of short-range grenade launcher accuracy enhancement, but then you're stuck behind a rock 35m from a bunker full of .50 cals hell-bent on your perforation, you're down to one last round for your M203, and if you could just get it through a window in that box of annoyingly loud heavy MGs, you could end all the noise and relax a bit. That's when you'll wonder if maybe Baldo didn't have a decent idea with the short-range GDC reticle, especially with the 16° lean branches.

Happens to me all the time, you know?

Edit: Realizing now that with the chevron zeroed at 100m (by drawing it 2 pixels under the boresight), it makes aiming the range display tricky (a lesson I'd forgotten from my adventures with the G36 special reticle). I'll have to revert that.

I saw a video about Mosin-Nagants, then this happened:

This is an SFOD adaptation of the Kobra I made for my personal installation of the DFWiQ mod.

Sometimes, I wonder if anything I say makes sense to anybody that isn't three levels deep yet...

This one's kind of fun...

I was unhappy with the RPG/AT4 discrepancy in the SFOD mod. I did up a hell of a drop compensator reticle for the RPG, and it's accurate out to at least 900m, and the AT4 is tricky beyond 100m, and I had an idea of a transparent front sight for the AT4. I also edited the AT4IRNA.tga to look more like the weapon model. I know my blur technique is a little weird, but I like it.

Oh, a Schmidt & Bender 5-25x52 reticle for the L115A1? Yeah.

nice


:headbang:

I did another Schmidt & Bender. The P4L2BE reticle for the PSG-1 in the SFOD mod. I tweaked it a bit for fun, but it's as close to original as I felt like making it.

For those not really understanding the significance of the barrel in the screen shot: that barrel, at that angle, in this resolution, from 100m away, is as close to 100 milliradians (about 5.73°, 343.77 MOA, or 101.86 mils) wide as a modder could wish for. That makes it easy to see if your mrad crosshair divisions are accurate.

This is my second attempt at a Hensoldt reticle. Googled around, a blueprint came up, I followed it, with adaptations, it looks alright, I get good hits with it, but I don't love it. That center post is obscurant on long-range targets. I do think the gradient green's a treat, though.

Note that I auto-adjusted the color in the screenshot and I was going to add sharpening like the P4L2BE screeny, and it cleared things up nice, but the artifacting uglied up that gradient I like so much, so I reverted it.

Schmidt & Bender call this reticle the P1 Bryant.

I redid the sight targas for the G36V in the SFOD mod. 3x mag., 200m, 400m, 600m, and 800m aimpoints as well as the range finder tested and confirmed to the best of my abilities.

I found a decent through-the-scope photo of a 3x reticle that I used as a reference for proportions and placement, and to preserve the 600m and 800m cross positions, I tweaked the drag in the ammo.def.

I like it.

Oh no. Oh, guys I'm in trouble. Just look at the screenshot attached.

This is the JO version of SFOD mod. All the game video settings are low. Texture compression is maximum. The friendly-fire warning should make it obvious how perfectly centered the crosshair is horizontally. I lowered the aimpoint vertically to zero it at 200m.

Look at the detail in that crosshair! This is what you can get to work in this game!

Now my problem may not seem obvious to you, so I'll spell it out: if I am capable of producing crosshair graphics that look that good, am I then obligated to?

Also note that at 1280×720, my preferred game resolution, this crosshair looks artifacty and a little blurry, but not much worse than the low-res version I made.

I'm going to stick with this for the G36V for now, but... am I going to have to redo all the sniper crosshairs?

This is why mods never get finished...

This one might get some argument. Mostly the 5x mag., but it makes things actually six times larger on screen, and my research into ACOGs is they have 6 power magnification. So, you know...

As best as my math can say, the chevron and hashes are all 48.26cm (19") at their various ranges, and the aimpoints are consistent with the infographic attached, although my testing shows that one-headshot kills are not really happening beyond 400m, and even 400m headshots are not reliable one-hit kills. I could get 700m and 800m hits with a little care and luck, but half-magazine kills don't really seem worth the effort to include hashes for those ranges.

I added inserts of the reticle on different backgrounds to illustrate the visibility, and if you check, you can see the chevron automatically adjusts brightness with the background, more or less, and isn't really useful in NVGs.

But I tried.

Looking good!

I'm not sure how I feel about the scratched glass effect, though. maybe some subtle dirt and grime, but it looks like someone went ham on that lens, haha.

The glass scratches just don't seem to match the quality of the rest of the graphic. The sight itself looks awesome, but I feel the lens is disproportionately lower in detail and kind of cheapens it. IMHO


The Acog reticle looks great. The markings should match the bullet trajectory if scaled right.

I'm kind of impressed with Nova's ballistic system and how accurate it is. In my mod, I have plugged in the real bullet specs for each round (weight, MV, and drag coefficient) as best I can with the info I can find online, so the bullet trajectory should be fairly accurate to the real deal. I used a graphic of a 4X acog, scaled it to match in game, and of course using an M16 5.56 each range mark was pretty close.

It only took a few minor adjustments to the graphic itself to get it to be accurate. I did this by setting up a shooting range in the MED, and setting targets at each range shown on the reticle. I then temporarily set the guns MOA error values to 0, set the recoil to 0, and set the ammo impact effect to something visible like a flare, to remove all other variables. Now I can see where the round impacts in relation to each range mark and adjust the range markings in GIMP to match the bullet impacts in relation to the reticle. Maybe kind of crude, but it works to make every mark accurate.


Keep up the good work! share more!

:headbang:

What happened with the CAR15Lb.tga is that I just wanted to attempt a dirt and wear effect, and I put the bare minimum effort into it, and just left it like that. I've since revisited the methods on glass targas for other weapons and they look slightly better. Maybe.

Under laboratory conditions (0 error, 0 recoil, 0 stability) on a suboptimal map (TD - Airstrip — 1000m fog and telephone poles for targets) and using the four Scorch0X.tga replacements you see in one of the screenshots above, I can get good testing done on these BDCs in the SFOD mod. I'd love to whip up a testing range in the MEd, but I can't get the MEd to start in the SFOD mod on my crate, and just thinking about troubleshooting that exhausts me, so I make do with less.

And my experimenting with BDC reticles has made it clear to me that a real ACOG is probably not pinpoint accurate at every range on every rifle you could mount it on, 'cause you could put it on an M16 with match-grade ammo, or an M4 with standard quality ammo, it's not going to function the same way. I wouldn't expect it to, anyway.

Speaking of experiments, I'm attaching screenshots of one of my favorites. The M14 has a full-auto mode with iron sights under the scope, and semi using the fixed 9x mag. scope with a mutation of the German 1 reticle I came up with. The center post is like an inverse ACOG where you use dude-wide gaps for ranging instead of dude-wide hashes. I didn't want to clutter up the reticle with numbers on the sides, so I cluttered it up with dots to designate the 400m, 600m and 800m aimpoints. It kind of works. The center post is 24x384px (36kb), the right horizon is 384x18px (27kb), and the left horizon is the right horizon mounted mirrored in the weapon.def. All that reticle for 63kb!

I did the Schmidt & Bender 5-25x56 crosshairs above similarly. The horizonal is one (12x768px) targa, and vertical is a second (768x12px) targa, and the rangefinder is a third (200x40px) targa. All together, about 103kb, uncompressed. If you pay attention to the 1mrad divisions left, right, and top, you'll see where I managed to shade 11px spaces to appear divided evenly into fifths. I'm a little proud of that, I am.

Looking at your ACOG, I get the impression that the chevron is white, edged with alpha, and using draw method blend. That would make it overly bright on dim maps. I could give you guidance on making a multiplyat targa with an add targa on top of it to make it more reactive to background lighting, if you'd like.

Its actually aluminated. Im not home at the moment, but next time i get a chance ill upload a gif. Its hard to see it with pics.

Those sights look great. Nice work! I did something similar with some of mine with dual sights options. It's nice to be able to utilize the features available to you as you would in reality.

Here's some of mine. I need to do this with the M21 as well, but I'll have to edit my current model as the mounts don't allow you to see the iron sights.


https://media.giphy.com/media/f86p7i...ized-large.gif

Here's how it looks in lower light.


https://media.giphy.com/media/PZcedu...Pybb/giphy.gif

I have the same issue with the MED with my MOD. I've found that if I temporarily move the weapon.def from my game directory, I can open the MED with no issues. then replace the weapon.def after you open the MED and it works.

I'm still trying to figure it out. I think it has something to do with the total size of all the new 3DI files fetched by the weapon.DEF. if I comment out all of the 3DI references in the weapon.DEF it will allow the MED to open. This is easy to do with a simple 'find and replace all' in notepad.

Now I just want to figure out if it is any one single 3DI causing the crash, or if it is the size of them all together as someone has suggested to me.