Remember how you found out
there even was a crosshair in Quake? It's not there in the
Options menu. For most of us it was word of mouth, newsgroup,
messageboard, or somebody's web site. If you bothered to wade all
the way through the readme.txt file, you might
have seen it mentioned as one of the features added in the v0.94
beta. "Added unsupported crosshair option ("crosshair 1" from console)". But that was
it.
I'm still not sure that Id
Software understood the full scope of the phenomenon they had just
unleashed upon the world when Quake arrived. Even the mouselook
command had to be activated from the console or a config file rather than
the options menu; and the off hand, by the way type of comment
that "yes, you can play Quake over the Internet"(prime candidate for
understatement of the decade!) that was buried in the Network Subsystem
Documentation section of the techinfo.txt file
just reinforces that view. But here we are four generations of the game and many years later.
People are still playing (and just discovering) it, and hundreds of
Internet servers are running it or one of it's many offspring 24 hours a
day all over the world.
HOW TO ACTIVATE THE QUAKE
CROSSHAIR
The crosshair in Quake is
really just the PLUS (+) sign from the character set that the game uses
for onscreen messages. Which is why it's limited to the small size.
There are two ways to start it:
1.
Bring down the command console
with the tilde (~) key, type crosshair 1,
and hit
Enter.
-- OR --
2.
Add the
command to your autoexec.cfg file. If you don't already have
such a file, create a text file with Notepad or any word processor
and name it autoexec.cfg. Inside
it type the command, crosshair "1". Put the autoexec.cfg file in the
quake\ID1
folder.
With the first
method, you'll have to type that command each time you start the game to
bring out the crosshair. With the second, the game will execute the
command for you automatically each time it starts.
HOW TO REPLACE THE QUAKE
CROSSHAIR
The crosshair is contained in
the gfx.wad file inside the pak0.pak. Gfx.wad holds all the console text characters, the hud numbers and
icons, and many other small graphics -- 127 files in all. But you
don't need to mess around inside it. The replacement crosshairs here
are built into gfx.wad files that are all identical to the original, except for
the crosshair itself. Installation is slightly different for regular
NetQuake than it is for Quakeworld. See
below.
NETQUAKE:
You'll need to get a copy of Pak Explorer (or
other pak file editing tool) to open the pak0.pak file inside the Quake/ID1 folder. See the Create a New
Pak instructions in the Quake 2 section for info on how to set up Pak
Explorer. When you open the pak0,
you'll immediately see the
gfx.wad file listed in the right window. Right click it and
rename it to anything you like. Exit Pak Explorer. The change
will automatically be saved. Now download any of the replacement
Quake crosshair files below, rename the file to gfx.wad and place it inside your ID1 folder. To restore the regular crosshair,
delete the gfx.wad file you
added, and rename the original file in the pak0 back to gfx.wad.
QUAKEWORLD:
Download a crosshair file from this page, rename it to gfx.wad, and put it in your QW folder. The game will ignore the gfx.wad file inside the pak0.pak. To restore the regular crosshair,
remove the gfx.wad file from the QW folder.
The first 9 created by
rjdriver. The 10th , the open red
cross, created by Dr Banzai
