So, yeah. Red Dot sights.

Anyone who's seen one of these in real life will know they aren't just red dots painted on a piece of glass, the way they're simulated in ArmA.

So, after a few drinks, a watch of 28 days later and a few other pieces of non-apparent inspiration, I came up with this idea:


So I built this from one of the M4s in the model pack:


And after a bit of tweaking to get it working right, here it is ingame:

When outside optics mode, the dot itself is conceal behind the bubble, making it invisible to the player.


The dot appears when the player zooms in. While it's actually about half a meter across in size, it appears to be projected on the screen.


Like a proper red dot sight, it moves across the screen depending on the angle at which you're looking at it from.

It's only on the gunner view LOD, so it won't be rendered on other units with these weapons (meaning a complexly shaped bubble and sight won't slow down machines as only one will ever be rendered) and as the gunner view LOD is rendered above every other object in game, the dot will always show up, even if it's physically inside other objects or the ground)

Rapidshare link to addon, binarized and source: Link
It'll only work ten times, so if you can't host it could you wait until someone who can uploads it elsewhere? Thanks

nice, thats really good work you have done there! 28 days later was the clear inspiration lol! I take it the only way to get all red dot sights (on all the weapons that have them) doing this is to change the model for each one. Or do you have a better way of doing it?

Yeah. It'd mean changing all the weapon models. Even if I could get it as an attachment to existing weapons with Red Dot sights, it'd need for the existing dot in the sight to be removed.

I'll see if I can make a replacement pack when I've got some more free time (there's only a handful of weapons with Red Dots for Vanilla ArmA, so it probably won't take too long), but for now it's more being released for people who want to incorporate the effect into their own weapon packs.


EDIT: Should probably be a bit more specific as to why the reticle isn't seen outside the sight itself. The "bubble" is textured with a near invisible texture (alpha of 0.01, for some reason completely transparent textures don't work) that is ordered beneath the reticle, and has a hole where it bisects with the sight. When the player looks through the bubble, anything on the gunner view LOD ordered above the reticle is not rendered, as the engine believes that it's covered. It's essentially the same hack use to have simulated animations of pistols in OFP.

As I (tried to) told you on MSN, it's a problem (bug?) with the alpha transparency. Yeah, that's what I was using so many words for to explain

I got it to work by using "#(argb,8,8,3)color(0,0,0,0.01,ca)". It's pretty much impossible to see (as you can tell by the picture).

I wouldn't imagine it's a bug, as this is an extremely hacky way of getting it to work. (things that are completely transparent should obviously always be see through! )