10th of February you sent out an mail advisement claiming CROSSHAIR OVERLAY to be a vital tool for gamers.
PROBLEM IS that Crosshair Overlay is VERY LIMITED IN IT’S DESIGN with very few Crosshairs to choose from.
To make Crosshair Overlay useful you should AT LEAST have five different basic designs of the Crosshair like a PLUS, X, TRIANGLE, SQUARE and CIRCLE design.
Also there should be at minimum of five or even teen different sizes ranging from very small to very large of each Crosshair design.
Optimal would also be if you could choose line density of the Crosshair.
This way you can get a Crosshair design and size of Crosshair that fits just about every game you play.
Just about every monitor manufacturer that have Crosshair Overlay make them very limited and then advertise them as it is a major feature. It is not a major feature if you can not use it in the games you play. Every game is different and a REAL Crosshair Overlay should have many Crosshair designs and lots of customization options to make the Crosshair design that fits the game you play.
Hope Spectrum Monitor can set a new standard for flexible Crosshair Overlay Design in a future firmware update .
Thats an excellent point @Fynxer . I’ve never had the opportunity to try a monitor with the built in crosshair, but from the images I have seen they typically have looked far from useful. Something like you’re talking about would definitely set Dough apart and ahead of the crowd to me.
To compliment your input, maybe put RGB sliders to set the color. An option for opacity would be pretty slick too, most the ones I’ve seen are a big, blocky solid color and large enough to obstruct that critical sweet spot in the FOV more than anything. Other crosshair designs I could see people wanting is a dot, circle dot, maybe a “T” shaped (standard + with the top removed).
Spitballing, useless info below:
Dough’s open firmware and connectivity focus really leaves some cool development opportunity for the homegamers down the line. Not sure it’d be possible yet, but imagine in the future being able to set up different reticles that would switch automatically as you change weapons in game. Say going from a customized circle dot on a shotgun type weapon to just a standard dot for a rifle. Be a trick, but usually you hit a number key for most game inventories. Macro that input to something to talk to the screen, thinking it would at best be a cludgy hardcoded feature with where tech is at these days, but potentially useful to those that dial it in to their needs.
I believe that the firmware team ran into issues with the amount of space needed to store the settings for this. It’s relatively limited, and they didn’t have enough space to store much in the way of custom info.
There was a question thread quite a while ago about crosshair colours, but none of the feedback there has been implemented yet.
The limitations made it impossible to implement an opacity option or an RGB slider. There is a limit to how many colors the OSD can support. The current monitors initially support only red, white, and black (as per update v. 102). With a slider, there will be hundred of thousands of possible colours which is something that the OSD can’t handle.
The upcoming firmware version 108 for ES07D03 (and its equivalents for the other models) will add support for green, blue, cyan, magenta, yellow, and three shades of gray. Basically with the firmware update, we are enabling all the possible colors supported by the OSD.
Oh, a bit surprising to learn of those limitations but not wholly unexpected. I’m guessing hardware limitation when it comes to generating so many colors, bit of a bummer opacity is outside the capability of the hardware suite but it is what it is.
At least we will have a good pallette of colors to choose from. Would it be possible to put in a reticle size and brightness slider? Any chance we will have a few reticle designs to choose from? If implementation is an issue of available on board storage, is there any possibility for using a plugged in USB drive to store/load reticles. I could see end users having fun designing their own reticles.
Thanks for getting back to us @Cas hope you’re feeling 100% again.
I think it has something to do with the fact that the scaler currently does everything, and there is only so much it can do. For a much more flexible setting, we will need a “computer module” inside the monitor that does the rest of the calculation, etc.
Another limitation is that the OSD cannot be transparent.
Think of the OSD as something similar to BIOS menu. It allows you to change many settings in the device, but not so much on its own design.
Definitely not on the current models, but it might be possible on Spectrum OLED. But this needs further exploring.
This will depend on how much access does the firmware developer actually allows certain changes to be done by the end-user. This is certainly not going to happen with the current Spectrum lineup, but it might be possible with Spectrum OLED.
