custom gunsights alpha

[morfiend]

I'm not sure if this will help you guys but years ago I stumbled on to this site and maybe you can find something of use there.

  http://www.mnwright.btinternet.co.uk/

Now this caters to M$ mostly but I recall he had a great DXT converter which might help with what your trying to accomplish.

   

[bustr]

How's this for a direction since we don't seem to really know:

HTC Art Staff,

Is there a way to create a gunsight reticle bitmap that will show brightly illuminated more so than setting the alpha slider all the way to the left with the standard offering of gunsights?

Thank you.

[RTHolmes]

Ive been playing around with the _alpha.bmp files and they do just create an alpha mask for the sight. unfortunately it doesnt have any effect on the builtin alpha, and there doesnt seem to be a way to prevent the sight being so desaturated against a light background (ie. the sky.)

[Ghosth]

Which is pretty much why I've never bothered with Alpha sites.
And have concentrated on bright vibrant colors that don't blend in with sky, ground, ocean, etc.





Also I tend to keep my sights very small, with as little between my eyeball and the bogey as possible.

Credit for the ring sight goes to Baumer, I just edited the color.

FYI the ring looks twice the size of the dot, but in game they are virtually the same size. Ring is just a couple of pixels bigger on each side.

[bustr]

This is probably only on my computer.

When I use your purple ring and go to full zoom it shows up with the center ring of white pixels imposed on a broader coarse ring of pink-purple pixels. From my paint program I know that you used a blur effect on your ring. In most cases except for solid none blured colors, I have found that the very center line of pixels shows white or very close once you spawn and zoom to full.

The games alpha mask seems to reduce your reticle colors down to about 6 primary bright lighter colors. White being the most prominant after you blur your personal reticle to get that high bright reflective look from the center of your lines, rings and dots. This is why I just make my reticles in single pixel white and run a very slight blur against them. It stands out on everything except directly into the sun.

[Ghosth]

Good point Bustr, never noticed that it did that before.

[bustr]

I've spent a bit of time thinking there was a way to increase the lumin value of pixels to achive the holy grail of contrasts by finding some special color. So I spent an unhealthy amount of time at full zoom which is equal to almost 800% zoom in a paint program looking through the gunsight. This is why I observed that your personal two bitmap alpha effect gunsight just adds a mask of extra pixels to look through rather than increase the lumin value for each individual pixel. I refer back to the sun in the games environment. You achive the background halo aura effect if after you blur and adjust up the lumin quality you do not go back in and erase the graidented pixels out of the black back ground around the lines, circles and dots.

I have an historical white Revi reticle with the vertical and horizontal lines streaking out to knife edges that has a white aura halo effect radiating outward and inward from the 70mil ring because I have been too lazy to clean up the gradient left overs from my adjustments. In the final analysis the halo is just a mist of pixels that fool the eyes into beleiving the primary white reticle lines are brighter than they are. There are times they reduce the visual clarity of the con I'm chasing if I'm looking down at ground clutter or water. Really need to finish cleaning it up.

I beleive if HiTech wanted to he could increase the max lumin value of the alpha slider for each effected pixel. Sort of like taking out the old light bulb in the base of the gunsight and putting in a new higher power one. This would affect across the board any colored pixel in the gunsight so it would show brighter than the maximum our current alpha slider gives us. Thats why I keep refering to making white recticles. In theory white pixels will have the highest lumin property in the gunsight mask.

HTC,

Is there any room to increase the lumin output of the current gunsight COAD to make the reticle lines, circles and dots a tiny bit brighter?

Thank You.