How to build your own gunsight
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I have been asked would i do a tutorial for people to understand on how to go about designing and making their own gunsights.
Because we are not all at the same level of understanding on certain things i have decided to adopt the fools guide to gunsight making
for this tutorial i will be using the MS based gunsight for many reasons , the main one being is the developer does not have to worry about coding he needs to think about design
so straight off i am letting you know there is no need to edit .swf files or the like all you need to have installed are
notepad++ https://notepad-plus-plus.org/
paint.net http://www.getpaint.net/index.html
and a copy of the MS base files (link to follow)
I think i need to explain first about MS , most gunsights use .swf files to store info like color , font,size,position,info etc. to edit these you first need to de compile the files then edit then recompile , this is pretty advanced stuff and not the intention of this tutorial , now on the other hand MS (does have base .swf files) but everything you see on screen are controlled through .xml files which makes it a lot more user friendly. lets look at the files this gunsight will use:-
mod_sight just sits in this location , no need to do anything to it.
and these files go into your flash directory , these are all the files you are going to need to create
your own gunsight, but oh wait ???? lets look in those two sub directories?
there is nothing so far that you need to edit or change but look above at the two folders (two because i was to lazy to create one ) these folders are where your going to do your magic
lets look what is inside the MS folder ,
this is where i have stored bits and pieces that i use in gunsights , NOTE i have them named GRIDS and MARKERS , consider a grid is the overlay for your gunsight where the marker is the center bit of the gunsight
the grids can be any size within reason , 500 x 500 is normally big enough but you could go 750 x 750 if you wished.
I think I need to explain here how this is going to work , first we need to build the overall look of our gunsight , this is where the grids come into play , designing a good grid is important as this is the thing your going to be looking at when playing the game , we also need a good marker design that is going to sit at the center of our grid. we dont need to worry about reload times etc. at the moment , i want to get the grid right first so i decided to revive an old gunsight that many of you would have seen before , i did do a bit of work on this many moons ago, who remembers this ?
this was once MJ’s gunsight and because of its simplistic layout was liked by many , i added the graphics ages ago and if you look at the cog bottom left of the sight next to the hitpoints , there is a corruption in there ,
this was something i overlooked before i uploaded the version i had worked on , but funny thing is it stayed with the gunsight for many , many patches later , google MJ,s gunsight and the corruption is there always
so lets use this gunsight above as a blueprint and try to re create this only a little better than before,
the sight consists of two sides (and two sticky out bits that i removed every patch) the rectangle is infact 400 x 200 pixels but we are going to want space outside of the rectangle to display info, so lets start with a canvas size of 500 x 500. (will include a 500×500 blank canvas with center spot marked) and i will re create a replica of this overlay ,
and here it is , i will not explain how to use paint.net but i will give a quick expo of how i got exact dimensions
i loaded the image above into paint.net then created a transparent 500×500 layer over the top of it with a red dot dead center of the empty layer , i lined the dot up with the center of the gunsight in the picture ,
i then drew a white rectangle on top of the picture same size as the existing panel , and then cut the middle out to leave both sides , i then added the blue rectangle over the top and again cut out the middle , i then deleted the bottom layer which was the picture leaving the new image you see below.tif you right click on it and download it you will see it is infact transparent apart from the colored bits.
at this point we should be thinking about the icons we are going to need to represent what we are going to display or if infact we are going to use icons at all ?
the original gunsight showed these:-
health points
distance to target
zoom amount
ammo count
but we can display a whole lot more info if we wish and where we want to show it on the overlay, but for this execrcise lets keep it simple and mimic the original , we can always edit later.
so i am now hunting for four icons ……………………………….. ok found what i needed and played with them in paint.net to get them to look like a set of matching items even though from different sources.
at the moment i have them oversized but will shrink, color then add to the gunsight overlay ok here is what they look like set at 34×34 and added to the gunsight. and the original
this is where all the action will take place so needs to be clean and simple. edit after looking at them side by side i reclored the new sight a little darker to match the icon color.
thats the overlay nearly done for the gunsight , this can be used for both sniper and arcade mode , we have hitpoints or health bottom left , our ammo info bottom right , our zoom level top right and our reload time info top left, we can move distance to target top middle and we should be good to go , like i said earlier , there is a ton of info you CAN add but lets just get close to this sight first before expanding upon it.
to be continued……………….
(next time we look at the .xml configs and how to add the info to where we want it in the gunsight.
this will be the finished gunsight ( i made it last night to test out and its fully working)
nice work. will follow this topic. as everytime superb work
Soulza
What if I have an old gun sight that I want to update how would I do that?
its the one anfield had with the blue aiming point
<a contenteditable="false" data-ipshover="" data-ipshover-target="/index.php?app=core&module=members&controller=profile&id=2735&do=hovercard” data-mentionid=”2735″ href=”/index.php?app=core&module=members&controller=profile&id=2735″ rel=””>@soulza
Can you please mod this jimbo crosshair so it is only single circle? not this double thing bullshit
here is a link to download, i am too dumb to do that
http://www.mediafire.com/file/2aacg9c2z8z79s2/0.9.16__Jimbo_Sights__Only_v2.zip
and here is the file from old jimbo that is single circle:
On 7.11.2016 at 3:23 PM, soulza said:i downloaded the file but not sure what you want to remove? can you post a picture and mark what you mean?
i know just by looking at the archive there are to many files involved there , three sniper files where it will work with just one.
i already did it but thanks for intrest!
But now i have another problem, how to add TD angles to that sight?
Good day
Is this method still valid for latest patch.
Also where to download below, would like to try my hand at this
and a copy of the MS base files (link to follow)
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