HUD Editing - Custom HUD Reticles

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Click16
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HUD Editing - Custom HUD Reticles

Post by Click16 »

Hello, welcome to my tutorial. Today we will be covering HUD Reticles. HUD Reticles are a good way to change the entire look and feel of the user's HUD. If you ever played DarkShallFall's BioDrop, you noticed how the reticles look different. It changed the feel of the weapon. Though some weapons go with certain reticles, lets take you through how to go about doing this yourself.

Some notes before we get started.
• HUD are very interesting to work with. Though it's fun, It also quite time consuming and sometimes frustrating.
• You might encounter some errors. Just chill out and don't worry. You can always try again.

Requirements
• Entity 1.3.9
• Entity UE v1.6
• Ch2R
• Adobe Photoshop
• Updated Bitmap Plug-in
• nVidia Adobe Photoshop Plug-ins

Let's get started!

Tutorial 3 - Custom HUD Reticles

1) Open any map you want in Entity 1.3.9. Go to the bitmap tag-class and select "incompetent\bitmaps\jackal_shield_mask"

2) Go to the Main Tab and right click the image area. Click "Internalize Bitmap" and go back to the tag list and open the tag in the Meta Editor.

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3) Scroll down to the "Bitmap Data" area and check "HUD Bitmap?" Also change the size to 64 x 64.

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4) Press "Save." Then go back to the Reference Editor. Select a different tag, it could be a bitmap, then select the jackal shield mask again. If you get an error, you must re-do it. If you continue to get an error, try using a different plug-in.

5) If you make it this far, congrats your bitmap is almost ready. Now all you need to do is add more bitmaps to that tag to get the right effect. Some cases, like the plasma pistol, energy sword, and the rocket launcher, it has a Lock-On reticle. this means you will need this many bitmap chunks.

0: Full screen
1: Half screen
2: Full screen Lock
3: Half screen Lock

6) For the sake of demonstration, I will use the Rocket Launcher and change the lock-on and the regular reticle. Now, go to the Chunk Cloner. Clone as many chunks as you want. Or should I say as many chunks as you need. There is no need for extra chunks. you will be cloning the items with the ".bitm" extension. When you are done, Click "Add Meta To Map."

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Also scroll down and find on of the weapon backgrounds. It should look like this "ui\hud\bitmaps\new_hud\backgrounds\<item name>_bkd"

Open the chunk Cloner for that item. Select the "Sequences" reflexive. Click "Copy to Clipboard" and go back to the jackal_shield_mask and add the sequences to that.

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7) Once you are done cloning, click any other tag and select your tag once again. Go to the main tab, check to see how the image is looking, If you get an error, you need to try again. If not, go to the meta editor. Change the sequences so that 0 points to bitmap 0, 1 points to bitmap 1 and etc.

Check "Parsed" and duplicate the Bitmap Tag. Rename it to something like this.

Code: Select all

ui\hud\bitmaps\new_hud\crosshairs\<weapon_name>_reticles
Image

8) Delete any chunks in the Jackal Shield Mask, and size it back to 128 x 128.

9) Go to your new bitmap and go to the meta editor. Here is how you will size the images.


0: Full screen 64 x 64
1: Half screen 48 x 48
2: Full screen Lock 64 x 64
3: Half screen Lock 48 x 48

select the different bitmap chunks then change the X and Y. Press save when your done.

10) Close Entity. Open your map in Ch2R and start up Adobe Photoshop. Browse to your bitmap.

Image

11) Now comes the part where you design the reticle. Create a new image using the size 64 x 64. Use the alpha channel. design your reticle in Grayscale. When you are done, go on to the next step.

12) Copy the entire Alpha channel. Paste it in the RGB. Flatten the image. While in the RGB channel, go to "Image" then "Adjustments" then "Hue/Saturation" or just press Ctrl + U on your keyboard. Check "Colorize" before entering any values.

Change the values to this:

Hue: 245
Saturation: 100
Lightness: -41

This will make the reticle blue. Now just save it as "<image name> 0" and use the "D3D/DDS (*.DDS)" format "8.8.8.8 ARGB Unsigned" and then resize the image to 48 x 48, save as "<image name> 1" using the same format as before. If you are using a lock-on image too, you will need to do the above process with that image too. (Save as <image name> 2 and <image name> 3.)
<image name> 3 and <image name> 4)

13) Once your done making the images in Photoshop, it's time to inject. Double click your bitmap on the left pane in Ch2R. A window will pop up, select the images and inject the corresponding image.

Image

14) Close out of Ch2R and open the map up in Entity UE.

15) Navigate to your bitmap. Use the Bitmap Editor to make sure the bitmaps are correct. If they all check out, go to the desired weapon's HUD. Now I don't have the updated [ndht] plug-in, but it will do without it.

16) Select "Crosshair" from the list at the top. Scroll down until you see a bitmap combo box. Choose your bitmap. For Full screen, use Chunk # 0. for Half and Quarter screen choose chunk 1.

Image

As for me, I need to find the lock-on chunk and change the stuff for that.

Image

Now it's time to test.

One player:
Image

Multi-screen:
The multi-screen image got corrupt. These are the results. I will probably fix the multi-screen images.
Image

Image

Thanks for reading and Goodbye!
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Aumaan Anubis
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Re: HUD Editing - Custom HUD Reticles

Post by Aumaan Anubis »

Moved to Tutorials.
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