Add outlined variants of all crosshairs (and use them by default)

[Calinou]

Outlined crosshairs have the upside of being visible on any background, even in front of the sky or bright lighting.

Outlines were created in GIMP by enlarging the canvas size to fit a 2-pixel thick outline (on crosshairs that need it), then using Filters > Light and Shadow > Drop Shadow… with the following options:

License files still need to be updated. I consider my changes to be licensed under CC0 1.0 Universal, which means the same license conditions as the originals would effectively apply.

Preview

Click to view at full size. /crosshairsize 15 is used on the screenshots below.

Before

After

[ac-stef]

Outlined crosshairs have the upside of being visible on any background,

...and the drawback of obstructing more of the field of vision.

even in front of the sky or bright lighting.

Shooting at neither of those is a vital part of the game ;)

Listen. Modifying crosshairs (and other HUD graphics) to ones liking is a staple of all ego shooters including AC. So much so, that AC included a feature to easily swap out batches of stock media files for modded ones. Hardcoding alternate file names is not very user-friendly.

I'd recommend, you check out this feature: f603031

AC ships with an example "zipped mod" containing the highres player skins. You may want to look at the file mods/protox_hq_reskin.zip

Once you've made a nice zip file, you may be able to get it onto one of the servers with custom media files. Players can then get the package with the "getmod" command.

By the looks of it, the documentation of that feature falls a bit short. Maybe, after working through creating you own first "zipped mod file", you'd want to write up your experience as a tutorial.

Feel free to ask me, if you run into problems.