[DFBHD] Baldo's New M60 Sight

[Baldo_the_Don]

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.

[Scott]

Nice work!

[Baldo_the_Don]

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.

[Baldo_the_Don]

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.

[Baldo_the_Don]

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.

[TrSniper]

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 . Maybe you could be our salvation to a new series in the DF since Nova has gone dark?

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?

[Baldo_the_Don]

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.

[Seahawk]

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

[Baldo_the_Don]

Originally Posted by Seahawk

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.

[Baldo_the_Don]

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.

[Baldo_the_Don]

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.

[Baldo_the_Don]

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.

[Baldo_the_Don]

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.

[Baldo_the_Don]

Oh look, more FAKE-OG reticles.

[Baldo_the_Don]

It's spreading to other games!

[Baldo_the_Don]

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.

[Baldo_the_Don]

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.

[Baldo_the_Don]

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.

[Baldo_the_Don]

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.

[Baldo_the_Don]

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.