[DFBHD] Baldo's New M60 Sight

[Baldo_the_Don]

This one still needs play testing, but these screenshots look neat.

It's essentially a skeletonized German #1 reticle. I tried something different with the illuminated chevron that so often in the past didn't look right, but since I made the lines 3 pixels thick on this one, it seems to work. The rounded ends and corners adds a character to the sight that I like for now, but I might square them off later.

The subtensions are 5 mrads tall and 5 mrads apart. A target walking perpendicular to line of sight needs a 2.5 mrad lead, so you line 'em up between the tip of the chevron and the first verticle line. A target running perpendicular to line of sight needs a 7.5 mrad lead, so you line 'em up between the first and the second verticle line. I'm getting good hits that way, at least.

Can confirm that if you sight in on an enemy, and they are the same height as the chevron and verticle lines, they're about 400m away.

Actually just realized I could shorten the 5 mrad marks, and add 5 and 10 mrad divisions to the verticle...

Hm.

Edit: Generally, this reticle isn't perfect, but it looks pretty good and I don't hate it. Extra subtensions seem helpful, and I tried to more closely match the translucency of the black lines to the red chevron. Targets in the new screenshot are all 1° apart at 100m intervals away, and I edited the map to bring my prone LOS up to their head level to make it easier to see how this reticle can make range estimation possible.

Edit again: And it turned into this. The last screenshot is of me hitting a guy running about 400-some-odd meters away.

Fun!

Edit (final?): Took another crack at the one with thick lines and round corners. Made most of the dimensions a pixel smaller, and made the lenses glow a tiny bit red instead of green, as you can see in the dark screenshot. I think it works better than the previous thick/round version, and, man, I'm sick of working on it for now.

Edit (*sigh*): 5 mrads being 14.5537127 px at this magnification made setting subtension sizes tricky. I think I figured it out. Unrounded things, too. Because of the fun!

[Baldo_the_Don]

I have no personal experience with H&K drum sights beyond video games, YouTube content about video games, and maybe a Forgotten Weapons video I've yet to see, but watching Operator Drewski playing Escape from Tarkov with an H&K weapon of some sort, and seeing how his sight picture looked, I did a bit of googling around, confirmed some suspicions, and made some edits. See screenshots attached.

Edit: Okay, sure, a drum sight has four zeroes, but if you add a fifth and fudge the notch, you get the classic game sight picture. Sort of.

Edit bonus: Saw a BDC reticle in a video about Squad. Ripped it off. Optimized for 4x mag. and yes, the BDC functions as expected.

Edit again: Made something up, again. Basically, a lens in the MP5SD's front sight shroud with a dot and three chevrons. The upper chevron's tip is centered and zeroed for 100m. The bottom of the upper chevron is the 150m aimpoint. The tip of the middle chevron is the 200m aimpoint, the bottom of the middle chevron is the 250m aimpoint. The lower chevron shows the 300m and 350m aimpoints. The dot is above the upper chevron and is for 50m. The whole thing is illuminated, and fairly reliable as far as the limited testing I've done can be trusted.

And I think I made it up. Guess I'll look around to see if something like this has been invented.

Edit uh-oh: After realizing the ballistics I have in the ammo.def are less than accurate, I will likely have to update the BDC. Or abandon it. We'll see.

Edit (whew!): General overhaul of the 9mm ammo.def entries. Adjusted velocities (400m/s, 285m/s) to citatable values (381m/s, 320m/s), and edited the drag from 0.25 to 0.149. The MP5SD's ammo loses speed a little quicker, but starts faster and it almost balances back to the same. I edited the BDC a few pixels, and it's all good now, playtesting pending.

[Baldo_the_Don]

Screenshot of a sharper, greener, altogether more goth MP5 BDC reticle. Minor general improvements on the targas.

And an excuse for me to post a bit of ammo.def modding information I've mostly confirmed today:

The maximum amount of recoil you can edit into an ammo.def entry is 255. If you go over that, the game wraps it back around to 0. Can confirm that recoil values of 0, 256, and 512 are functionally the same, and 255, 511, and 1023 all look about the same.

'Cause in some games, when you fire a Barret, the muzzle flies skywards, and when the scope settles back to where the target was, it's often disappeared; disintegrated off screen while the recoil was showing you an interesting cloud. 255 is a lot of recoil for a weapon in a NeverLogic game, but won't test your object permanence unless you edited in a really high magnification level.

4-11x at 255 recoil isn't high enough to make the disappearing target trick happen, but you might remember the WZ2 Signal 50 reticle I ripped off and posted a while ago and how I thought it was so cool that at 20x, the subtensions denoted mrads, but at 7x, they were MOA. Well, I redrew that reticle, made it a bit smaller, and discovered that it does the same mrad/moa scaling between 11x and 4x magnification.

So I'm having fun with all this, and I hope you are, too.

Quick edit: Paying a bit more attention, and firing from the standing position, can confirm that, in 16:9 aspect ratio, 255 recoil at 11x mag. will throw your entire field of view off of a man-sized target at any expectable engagement range! Neat!

Edit: The numbers in the original screenshots of the 4-11x Signal 50 reticle I had drawn at 3x6 pixels. I tried making them 5x6px, and I don't hate the way they look. The narrow numerals were elegant and legible, but the wider ones have more personality.

[Baldo_the_Don]

The first screenshot is a frame from an Operator Drewski Arma 3 video. The illuminated TA31-CH reticle in all its glory. Note the width of the reticle, the width of the sight housing, the width of the screenshot, and the 4.0x label to the upper right.

The second, third, and fourth screenshots show my interpretation of the TA31-CH in the dark, the NVGs, and daylight with a man 100m away. Proportions seem correct, BDC placements are different, but since I trial and errored my POA hashes thoroughly to within a pixel of POI, I'll brook no complaints about that.

So arguably, I've interpreted the size and proportions correctly, but what isn't labeled is the fact that I had to put 11x magnification on this to get the dude-wide (0.4826m) hashes to actually be dude-wide.

I suspect that when it comes to interpretations and labeling of magnification levels from game to game, there's, like, just so much wonk.

11x mag. makes CQB engagements a bit more exciting than I like, so I reserve the TA31-CH for semi fire mode, and auto has 2x mag. with the red dot I made that was inspired by the one I saw in an XBox Ahoy Call of Duty weapon guide. It's fat, but sharp. See the fifth attachment for yourself.

Or maybe I should do up an illegible, barely functioning 2x version of the TA31-CH for auto?

Hm.

Edit: The 2x didn't work out. But a version of the TA31-CH for 4x is close enough to perfect in my opinion.

Another 4x - 11x pairing. I swear, I didn't do this intentionally.

Edit again: Black with red dot, and other attempts at improvements, like slightly redesigning and repositioning the 4, and lightening some of the lines to imply subpixel fineness.

[Baldo_the_Don]

I already have a few good versions of the PSO-1, but I like wasting my time on these little experiments.

I made this mostly by tracing the screenshot from the video, but I did have to do some math and fudging on the horizon after asserting that, even though 5x mag. in the WiQ mod was a near perfect fit on the rangefinder, the millirad divisions were badly off.

The main chevron could stand some tweaking, but this is a decent third draft.

Quick edit: Dimmed the mrad marks by 50% and the main chevron's a bit less obscured.

Edit: 'Cause I might as well do the PSO-1-1, too, right?

Mostly traced from the screenshot, 5x mag., I like the version I created from scratch better, so this would've been a considerably extra waste of time, were it not for the experiments I tried for drawing the curve that worked out so well. My usual approach would be to meticulously mathematically place straight lines from point to point, implying a curve, but this time, I trial-and-errored a specific pixel from which I could pull a single ellipse that mostly met all the points necessary. I could never get a single ellipse to work on the PSO-1, I always had to fudge two ellipses together, but this made me think I should maybe keep trying.

But not today.

Quickish note: Why is the rangefinder that wide, particularly? I would set the vertical lines 10 mrads apart horizontally, but that's not happening here, and I wondered, are maybe the lines dude-wide (0.4826m, 19") at 50m and 100m? I checked. They almost are, so they probably should be, and I think I might have to edit that later.

Sometimes, things only look stupid 'cause you're missing information.

[Baldo_the_Don]

I like an ACOG reticle. I get along with a dude-wide-at-300m chevron so well. And I was inspired be recent experiments to take the M4 and its 4x reticle, scale it up to 11x, and set that on the semi mode. It does bother me that the 110 mrad horizon is not fully displayed as I've mounted it, but I can live with that for the clarity of the lines and ease of aiming.

It's not easy getting a 3x5 pixel number 4 that's closed at the top to not look like a blob, but I think I managed it.

[Baldo_the_Don]

Instead of semi having 11x mag., I did a bit of math, a bit of testing, a bit of redrawing, and what I got is 6x mag. for semi, lending a little more focus, but being much more believable, visually.

Edit: Similar treatment of my G36 sights, but instead of 4x and 6x mag., it's 3x and 5x. I like how it turned out.

However, though the gods have made it undeniably clear how contemptuous they are of perfect works produced by mortal hands, and how joyful to them the wrath they will rain down upon the mortal that dares to threaten their supremecy shall fall is, I had a dilemma of flaws to choose from.

The inner edge of the ring is not only supposed to have a diameter equal to 1.75m at 400m, the lower point of the inner edge should also be the 400m aimpoint. I did not want to play around with ammo velocities and drag coefficients today, so I had to decide against making the ring's inner diameter target-sized at 400m, and made the lower inner edge of the ring the 400m aimpoint.

The outer diameter of the ring is kinda dude-at-400m sized, though, and the lower point of the outer diameter is pretty much the 500m aimpoint, but that's coincidence.

[Baldo_the_Don]

So, what I call the AWM reticle is optimized for 11x mag. Such fine lines.

And going through the WiQ mod weapon.def, I edited almost all select fire weapons so that the semi mode has one or two extra levels of magnification. The ring sight on the P90 turned out so good! I had to draw slightly larger versions of the AK47 and Famas front sights, the Kobra T for the AK74 was a bit less trouble, and the ring on the AUG was easy enough. I'll add screenshots later, I'm exhausted right now.

[Baldo_the_Don]

Some screengrabs of an Operator Drewski Escape from Tarkov worked up into a "LeoTech" sight for the M4. I don't have M4 .3di models with an EoTech mounted, but the targas are a much smaller effort. S'fun.

Attached screenies are 1024×768 just to show a little more detail at the bottom. Auto has 2x mag., semi has 3x. I'm really enjoying that trick.

Edit: Tried to put less blur on the inside of the sight housing and it got pixelly, so I increased the targa from 256×320 to 384×480, added some more careful blurring on it, and uploaded new screenshots.

[Baldo_the_Don]

This one was a treat /S

Another Operator Drewski video:



...Triggered my mod response. 'Cause I kind of hate the reticle on this Hamr scope (timestamps 14:19 and 18:40). I had to try some things.

Escape from Tarkov handles art assets, lighting, tranparency, et cetera, in vastly different ways than NL games do. Mostly, it's okay, but the one .jpg attached below shows how in the right circumstances, the reticle mostly disappears. I had to experiment.

To get started, I took screengrabs from the video, resized them to be 1024px wide (NL's HUD grid width), then traced the reticle to get a targa for testing sizing and correct magnification. After mounting the targa on the M4 and adding a variable zoom from 4x to 19x, got in a test map and figured out that 12x is actually optimal. At 12x, The outer horseshoe width was dude-wide (48.26cm) at 200m, the inner horseshoe width was dude-wide at 300m, and the 400m hash was dude-wide, too. Then I confirmed that the horizon was divided into 10 moa subtensions. I then tweaked the ammo velocity from 930m/s for the ACOG down to 890m/s, and all the points of impact aligned with the points of aim, although it took me a minute to realize the center dot needed to be zeroed at 200m.

Form and function established, I moved on to targa aesthetics. Knowing I needed a multiply layer (to make dark bits on bright backgrounds) under an add layer (to make bright bits on dark backgrounds), I went through several versions, going from grey lines that faded to nothing against backgrounds of certain brightness, to the lightish grey lines with darkish outlines that are sometimes suboptimally visible, but always there.

I couldn't get the horseshoe to completely disappear against bright backgrounds like the 14:32 screengrab from the video, but it gets very pale when you aim at snow or the sun. The reticle is really good in low light, for sure.

The neat thing about 4x mag. on auto is that the reticle is almost exactly three times larger than the 12x mag. in semi, so the inside of the horseshoe is dude-wide at 100m at 4x. At least I think that's neat.

I have an idea I want to try still, but I'm not confident anything better will come from the experiment, but if something does, I'll update this.

Quick edit: Attachments 5 and 6... they're EFT authentic, but that's not better, is it? Compared to attachments 7 and 8?

I mean, I know I can just do this reticle like the dozens of others I've done, but what I'm going for here is a reticle that still holds the original's style while improving the usability. Make it like Tarkov, but better.

I don't know. It feels right, though.

Edit: * sigh *

The last screenshot. Is this me being practical? Or have I no creative stamina?

[Baldo_the_Don]

I'm so sick of the Hamr reticle. It makes so little sense to me that I have to put magnitudes more effort into making it like the original, but less crap, than I need to exert to make it to my personal preferred standard.

As a break, I did a ripoff of the one Schmidt & Bender ripoff from BF2042. The orange-pink illuminated cross is fairly correct, but no less confusing to me that that color shouldn't really work, but it does seem to.

Edit: Realized the weird lengths of the rangefinder lines might be my misinterpreting the source screenshot 'cause of the distortion effect in the scopes in BF2042, so I did an edit. Looks okay.

[Baldo_the_Don]

I got 4x mag. on the M4 in auto, 6x for semi, I drew a whole new Elcan reticle for the 6x. mag., and tried something slightly different for the red dot illumination.

I haven't playtested this beyond confirming POA/POI fidelity, but I'm optimistic.

Edit: I had the thin lines a little transparent to imply fineness, but it just made seeing the lines difficult on patchy backgrounds, so I reverted them to pure, opaque black. The red dots also felt oversized, so instead of just a 3px and 5px red dot, I mathed up some new 2 moa red dots that feel about right, even though the 4x red dot fades badly on a pure dark background in the NVGs. I'm not gonna sweat that, though.

Edit through gritted teeth: Operator Drewski video, he looted a nice M4 and the scope has an Elcan-like rangefinder that says "30 in. / 76cm," and I'm like, Wait. isn't 30 in. 70cm?, so 30 ÷ 39.3701 = 0.7619995.

76.2cm. Damn it. Further edits pending.

Edit after lunch: Alright. Screenshots of the 76cm problem, the Elcan edit, and the new SAW 'LeoTec.'

[Baldo_the_Don]

The first attachment is based on the Zeiss Terra XB75 crossbow scope, although the illumination was my work. The second screenshot is my advancement of the idea with added ranging stadia and a CV163 that's head wide at 20m, 10x mag, shoulder wide at 20m, 3x mag. I adapted the bolts from explosive-tipped to 400 grain hunting bolts. One headshot, two torso hit kill from any range, pretty much, but with a more or less realistic, tactical bolt velocity of 134m/s, that range is limited.

[Baldo_the_Don]

There was another video. It almost always starts that way, with me.

The segment was about Hell Let Loose and some guy used his binoculars, and it had a neat reticle, so I had to try.

Tracing a screenshot was a start. The vertical scale looked wonky, but googling around brought up some diagrams and a photo of the actual reticle, so I redrew it from the ground up. See the attachment.

The vertical scale is actually called an Eames scale. It's calibrated to the ballistic arc of a .30-06, and would be useless 99.9% of most deployments, but should that one-time-in-a-thousand opportunity arise where an enemy position is located behind a low rise within two thousand yards from your unit, a sneaky commander could get eyes on them, estimate the range between target and unit, do a bit of math, and then ordering the rifles to aim at a certain point just above the rise and open fire, could lob the volleys over it, suppressing them. At least, that's how I understood this explanation:

https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/6...e-explanation/

If you want to google around yourself, it's an M3 binocular reticle with Eames scale.

Edit: Uh-oh.

I've had a little experience with binoculars. I know that if you don't squish the tubes too tightly together, don't fold them at the hinge enough, you can get that figure-eight-on-its-side/infinity-symbol view-edge on them, keeping your FOV nice and wide while maintaining depth perception in the middle.

I've looked through rifle scopes as well, long ago, with one eye, crosshair centered, as expected.

What I have yet to do, however, is look through binoculars that have a reticle. And a line from the TM 9-575 from May 4th, 1942 about how the M3 binoculars have the reticle in the left telescope trickled through the noise in my head (Bat Out of Hell from Meat Loaf, actually) while I was showing my wife the attachment on this post, and I realized... either the reticle should be smaller and centered in the arc on the left, or the edge should be perfectly circular and larger.

Hm. Decades it took for that coin to drop. I might should be embarrassed.





Edit again: New M3 edge targa. Thinking 9x is a bit high, will make a 4x version soon. Also, NVGs and binoculars are redone.

Edit the last(?): There we go. A 4x mag. optimized M3 reticle with an Eames scale as a binocular-like sight for the satchel detonator, 'cause I'm skilled enough to do it, and dumb enough to think I should.

[Baldo_the_Don]

This video:





Is about the new SLx 1-6x24mm SFP Gen IV rifle scope from Primary Arms with an illuminated ACSS Nova fiber wire reticle. C_DOES is entertaining enough for an optic reviewer, so that was a plus, but you might know what I'm like by now, and the screenshots attached happened.

I'm not sure about this one, though. It's supposed to be 1-6x, but the version I drew up for 5x mag. (which makes things 600% bigger in game) was blurry and illegible. I have the M4 auto at 2x and semi at 9x. The thing is, if we accept a 1x optic at 2x in game, then 11x actually makes things 572% bigger than 2x.

I'll grumble over that for a while later, but I used a screen grab of C_DOES aiming at a cardboard silhouette in his basement, resized it to HUD grid width (1024px), traced the reticle, mounted it on the M4, and went up and down the zoom 'til I found a power that fit the 300m hash the best, and that was 9x. Then I redrew the whole thing again using math, and the results are displayed below.

If you watch that video, you'll also understand why I did up a new red dot for this one. It's not as strong as the video shows it should be, but it has flair! The first attachment shows the medium brightness, the rest are either low or high.

I don't believe the hashes are supposed to be a BDC, they're all one mrad apart, so they're mainly for ranging, but I edited the velocity and drag a bit, and at 990m/s, drag 0.372, (I find drag 0.273 to be best) 300m hits a little low, 500m is a tiny bit high, but the others are what I consider spot on. In the video, C_DOES calls the thick part of the line the taper, and I'll look that up later, but the lower taper as a 700m aimpoint also hits low.

I played one SP mission to test this, and I did okay.

Edit: Added screenshots of the 11x version, because of the fun!

[Baldo_the_Don]

I keep ending up with 11x reticles 'cause 1 milliradian is so close to being 8px as to barely make a difference, and it makes drawing them easy, yet effective.

[Baldo_the_Don]

Today, I have an exercise in extremes and detail.

An ordinary Trijicon ACOG with a green chevron and BDC out to 800m, optimized for velocity 860, drag 0.397, and 35x magnification. It's a magnificent mess, this one.

Note that 35x is the maximal usable zoom level in NovaLogic games. At 36x and higher, .3di items stop rendering. At least that's what happens on my crate.

[Baldo_the_Don]

They tell you to leave a pimple alone. They tell you that, and it really is the best tactic, but only the strongest of us can do it. The rest of us poke, and prod, and, without fail, squeeze. That works out well enough most of the time, luckily, but it's not the best method of skin care.

That's the Hamr reticle, in my head. A mental boil I can't leave in peace. I want it fixed.

And I got some good stuff done, this time around. I optimized it for 19x mag., 'cause nobody does 19x mag.! Ged-ah-dah-heah!

But at 19x, 2.5 mrads is 34.871148px, so...

BDC POA and POI optimized for velocity 860, drag 0.397.

This is the best version of this reticle I've gotten done so far.

Edit: Looking at the first post I made about the Hamr, I see the horizon is supposed to be in 10 moa subtensions, and honestly, if I was working with slower ammo, I'd be a stickler about that, but this weapon, with this ammo velocity, 7.5 mrads (25.783099 moa) is such a good lead (foreaim [is apparently not a word], not plumbum [is actually a word]) for a perpendicularly running target.

And a green reticle works best in NVGs on a scoped (not just sighted) weapon.

[Baldo_the_Don]

Okay, this is a screenshot from Counter-Strike: Condition Zero Deleted Scenes, yes, but I'd like you take a good look at the reticle before you write your representatives about DFBHD modders wasting your time. See, I decided to do a bit of long required googling, and found that what I've been calling the Hamr reticle all this time is the Leupold CMR2. And there was an actual infographic explaining the reticles dimensions in MOA and mrads, so the sprite I made is a decent interpretation of the blueprint, considering I had to do it under 256px².

I made two versions of this reticle for CS:CZDS and two for CS:CZ, for reasons. One with a red dot/horseshoe and black lines (like the screenshot), but due to the way multi-colored sprites work, with unblended alpha and seriously pixelly edges. The other version is fully red and beautifully blended alpha.

So all this time, I was thinking this reticle looked a bit wonky, but the infographic did make it make sense.

CS:CZ has two full-auto sniper/DMR rifles, and for all the lead you can throw with them, you actually kind of have to, 'cause the accuracy on them is frustratingly inconsistent. I think I might be using them wrong. I don't know.

Edit: Of course I made an ACOG. It's on the SG552 in CS:CZDS.

[Baldo_the_Don]

More CS:CZDS stuff. You'd tell me if I should stop, right?

I did up a Vortex UH-1 for the SG552. Yeah, the viewmodel literally has an ACOG mounted on it, but it also has only 1.9x magnification, so an accurately scaled ACOG chevron would be 2.5×2.2px, if my math is even only almost correct, so, nah. And the Vortex is just a change-up from the Sig ring-dot I made as a change-up from the Eotech. I'm so fickle.

I moved the ACOG to the Scout. The actual reticle in the scope on the real-life Scout is pretty boring, as far as my googling can tell, so I think this is an improvement, aesthetically.

Again, I'd like to emphasize that, if my math is not all too wrong, this ACOG reticle I mounted on the Scout is accurately scaled. I think. To test it, I'd need a target of known size at a confirmable distance, and I have yet to figure out how to do these things in CS:CZDS.

But...

I have convinced myself that the default FOV in CS:CZDS is 90°, or 5400 MOA (I'll tell you how if you ask me to). I have confirmed that, at max zoom, the Scout makes things 7.48x larger. 5400 ÷ 7.48 = 721.92513 MOA. The ACOG chevron is 5.53 MOA wide. I play at 1280×720. So. 5.53 ÷ 721.92513 = 0.00766 × 1280 = 9.8048. I drew the chevron 9px wide. I went through this with every dimension of the reticle. I can't say it's scaled correctly without testing, but this is a very similar method to the one I used to make reticles in NL games, and the scaling on those I have tested thoroughly, and I do claim as accurately scaled.

Either way, it looks great, and the crosshair they put in the game is terrible, so my joy is immense, if muted.

Also, I figured out how to blur the edges of the scope frame, so yay me! That was some aliasing I really wanted gone, y'know?