Customizing Crosshairs

What are "Crosshairs"?

The term crosshairs refers to the gunsight in the center of the screen.  Each weapon in Half-Life presents its own distinctive crosshairs. Some even have several different crosshairs. For example, the image to the left shows the "zoomed" crossbow crosshairs.

Why consider changing crosshairs? If you've ever used the telescopic sight on the .357 Magnum pistol, then you probably don't have to ask: the "zoomed" .357 crosshair is nothing more than a single dot in the center of the screen.

Examining Your Crosshairs

Crosshairs are kept in a sprite file called crosshairs.spr, but you won't find it in your Half-Life directory unless someone has already modified your crosshairs. That's because  the Half-Life distribution packages many of its components, including crosshairs.spr, into the Half-Life\valve\pak0.pak file. The Half-Life Model Viewer hlmv can be used to view and extract the contents of these PAK files.

To view the standard crosshairs just follow these steps. You don't need to do this if you just want to install new crosshairs that you've downloaded.

1. Use Mete Ciragan's hlmv to extract crosshairs.spr from valve/pak0.pak. You'll find the crosshairs file in the sprites subdirectory of the PAK. Let's save it as Half-Life\valve\sprites\crosshairs-orig.spr. You may need to create the sprites directory.
2. Use David Flor's sprview to open crosshairs-orig.spr and save it as crosshairs-orig.bmp. This is a form we can deal with more conveniently.

3. Now open crosshairs-orig.bmp with your favorite graphics editor, such as Jasc Paint Shop Pro. You should see the image at right. This single image contains the crosshairs for all weapons.

It can be confusing to determine which parts of the image are for which weapons. To clarify things, Tweezer's Half-Life Health Club offers the chart below. This is a blowup of the standard crosshair image with labels to denote which locations in the sprite image correspond to which weapons. Redrawn from an illustration by Robert Christopher on the Bullseye web page.

The crosshairs labelled in green are the autoaim crosshairs. Autoaim is not commonly used in multiplayer games.

Modifying Crosshairs

To change the crosshairs, one simply edits the BMP bitmap image of the crosshairs, converts it back to an SPR sprite file, and saves it as Half-Life\valve\sprites\crosshairs.spr. Fortunately it is not necessary to modify the original crosshairs stored in the PAK file since files in the sprites directory override the contents of the PAK.

To edit the crosshairs follow these steps, which continue the steps shown in the previous section:

4. Edit crosshairs-orig.bmp with your favorite graphics editor. Save the modified version as Half-Life\valve\sprites\crosshairs.spr
5. Use Michael "Spider" Morace's sprwiz to compile the BMP file into an SPR file. Save it as valve/sprites/crosshairs.spr.

My own custom crosshairs are shown below. They are only slightly modified from the original. The changes provide greater visibility, especially for the .357 Magnum. 

To use my crosshairs, download the file crosshairs.spr and save it in the sprites directory:

Half-Life/valve/sprites/crosshairs.spr

There are many alternative crosshair sets available on the net. Check out Crosshair Central and Bullseye (see the Resources Section on this page). To use any of them, just save the file as crosshairs.spr in the sprites directory.