I was around half way through The Pain Maze level with low health and ammo. I decided to snipe from a long distance at an arena with 3 heavy knights. I was missing every shot with my lightning gun and nail gun. That's when I found out my crosshair doesn't line up with the guns at all!! I had to aim with the bottom edge of my crosshair just to barely hit those knights. I recorded some clips and it's worse than I thought, the lightning was hitting a whole body height lower than the crosshair! After dying multiple times in that small arena I ragequited. Sorry for the rant. I like this game and I want to enjoy it, but feels like this game is trying really hard to annoy and make me quit.

I always hated the Quake crosshair, it's poorly lined up and also looks really ugly. I usually play with it off.

just keep playing! you will not need crosshair soon. I feel exact number of nails needed for each enemy encounter, and if I'm wrong, it's always just one last nail, and I somehow know it.

Maybe I'll try play without crosshair or with the crosshair in my gaming monitor and finish the game, but for now I need to rest a bit

That's normal, and is the way how it was for 30 years. The cross hair in Q1 is not at the center of the screen, rather it's at the center character if you'd fill the whole screen with text, it's like the in-game console is written with spacebar and one + at the closest spot to the center.

why did they do that?? couldn't they just draw it like a normal HUD element?

crosshairX is your solution if on pc/steam

That sounds primitive tbh

68 for shambles?

I mean, I know when to stop firing, but I never count

Ask John Carmack, I guess 😉

NJC (Not John Carmack), but my guess is it's more compute effective to have a console font character instead of a graphic file, and also that the crosshair was added late in dev.

A crosshair image file like the .PCX files they used in Quake 2 would have to be implemented and use extra CPU cycles to render transparency, whereas the text anywhere on screen was already implemented in the engine and could be hacked to add a console font character to use as crosshair on (or as close as possible to) the center pixel.

But hey, that's just a theory. A QUAKE THEORY! I do remember playing it in good ol' 320x200 and having to compensate quite a lot when firing rockets in deathmatch.

Do it. You'll feel like a boss once you get used to knowing how to aim without it.