Widescreen Gaming Forum

Has anyone come up with a fix for the lack of the crosshair being displayed when Half-Life 2 is played on 3 monitors? I have tried it both with and without Matrox's SGU optimization for my Triple Head 2 Go DV, but the only way I can get crosshairs is to drop back to a single display.

Zoandar

There is no actual "fix" that we know of, and Valve doesn't care enough to tell us how to fix it. But its been tried and true that the crosshair works in HL2: Cinematic Mod. Which is a bit hard on computers but with the latest one you can select which textures get installed IIRC.

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EVGA GeForce GTX 970 SC ACX 2.0 3.5GB | 3 X LG Flatron 24EA53VQ in Nvidia Surround | Optoma HD20

Thanks. I'm a poor enough shot when I have the crosshairs. I can't imagine playing the game without them. ;-)

I did see several different beta versions mentioned for the Cinematic Mod (CM) as well as a lot of complaints about what they did to poor Alyx in the process. If you could recoomnend a good place to find the latest mod with the user configurable options, I would be most grateful.

Also, is the CM usable along with Matrox's SGU optimization, or would I want to leave that turned off when using the CM?


Zoandar

Cinematic Mod version 10 allows you to selectively mod the characters. Alex is preserved if you wish her to be.

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EVGA GeForce GTX 970 SC ACX 2.0 3.5GB | 3 X LG Flatron 24EA53VQ in Nvidia Surround | Optoma HD20

OK, I finally found a copy of the CM10 mod here:

http://www.gameupdates.org/details.php?id=3833

And it says "for 64 bit systems ONLY". What's up with that? I don't have a 64-bit system. Did anyone make the mod for 43 bit?

Zoandar

Technically it is for 64-bit mode only, but I have heard of people successfully running it on 32-bit mode. Since you have this problem I would suggest downloading an earlier version of the mod, say version 3. If that doesn't float your boat then I think you may want to look for some HUD modifications.

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EVGA GeForce GTX 970 SC ACX 2.0 3.5GB | 3 X LG Flatron 24EA53VQ in Nvidia Surround | Optoma HD20

Thanks for that suggestion. When I got the email you had replied I was actually looking at some of the earlier postings of the CM to see if they mentioned 64-bit or the missing crosshair. So I will try that, and report back how it goes. Surely there must be others dealing with this on 32-bit WinXP systems.

One other incentive for me to try the earlier CM versions is that I have old hardware, and also even the base 9.0 version had grown to 4.5GB. That's a pretty hefty download. Hopefully the earlier versions have a much smaller file set. There seems to be some confusion about whether the CM works on the first portion of HL-2, before the additional episodes are added.

One thing I did try which didn't help. I tried running HL2 in a window instead of full screen. After playing around with that in various resolutions I came to the conclusion that is isn't so much that I am spanning multiple displays as that in order to do so I am using the widescreen 16:9 format. It seems any usage of that format (perhaps even on a single display, but I haven't tried that yet) removes the crosshair. If I use the 4:3 format, it has the crosshair, but I can't get that to stretch across all 3 displays properly.

Zoandar

Well it wasn't easy, but I finally managed to download CM 4.0, and got it up and running. Alyx looks neat in shades. But still no crosshairs to aim the pistol, once I got that.

Due to the Jurassic age of my AGP 7600 GT card, I had to crank the display down a but, running at 3072 x 768 to stop the game from crashing on loading. Then once Alyx met me in the elevator, I was getting serious stuttering in both video and audio, so I had to crank down several of the display options from their highest setting to medium. But since doing that, the game is playable and still looks pretty decent. But would having reduced those settings helped to lose the crosshairs? I didn't have the pistol yet at that point.

So, you mentioned HUD mods? I had seen some mention of making "different" crosshairs in Half-Life. Are you suggesting that one of those mods might actually turn the crosshairs on for triple display gaming? Any suggestions which one might work?

Didn't there used to be an option to turn crosshairs on and off in HL? Or am I remembering wrong. If there is one I can't find it.

Zoandar

You could always try SoftTH.

When configured correctly, SoftTH doesn't cause Half Life2's cross hair to disappear.

Thanks. I'll look into that option.

But in order for the CM to have gained the reputation for working around the missing crosshair issue, some folks must have achieved success. I wonder if perhaps that didn't happen with the really early versions, but came along later in its development? I suppose moving a few more releases toward current might reveal that. Although I haven't seen download sources for every release version, I have seen versions 7 and 9. Now that I have set up Firefox to actually work downloading huge files I can shoot for version 7 and see if it matters.

Maybe it would also be helpful to try and reach the operator of the FakeFactory site and ask them up front if it is supposed to work. If they implemented it in mid development they would know when.

Thanks for the help!

Zoandar