Is there any way for the game to show the original crosshair? It's showing a rather simple-looking reticle as opposed to the original WC reticle.

There is a way, albeit not "simple".
You could edit the .cockpit files within data/cockpit, and add a crosshair sprite.

um, where exactly is this directory? I don't see it anywhere in the PU directory...

It should be inside a hidden folder, named "." (dot) + game name, where game name could be either "vegastrike" (the name of the engine), "privateer" (the name of the mod), or something like that.

(I'm not sure whether PU changed it from the mod it based itself on, which was "privateer")

So look for any such folder.

If you're in linux, the folder's in your home folder.

If you're in windows, the folder's in PU's data folder.

I went through the .pu folder, but still haven't found any hidden folders of the given names.

Ouch... sorry man, I thought I was replying to another thread (they were asking where screenshot files are saved)

It's directly in <pu folder>/cockpits/<something>-cockpit.cpt

alright, I found the the cockpit.cpt file

I found the line that has the crosshair thing.

<Crosshairs file="crosshairs.spr" xcent=".0001" ycent=".276" height=".55"/>

Do I need to edit any of this?

Yep... that's the "ugly" crosshair.
You have to replace that by a sprite-based crosshair (just like other crosshairs in cpt files).
So you have to build a crosshair .png and .sprite file.

looks like they have the sprite-based WC crosshair png file in there. What do I need to do about this .sprite file you speak of?

After comparing against other mods, that looks like a sprite-based crosshair already. Perhaps all you need to do is change the png and its size in the .spr file.

the .spr file had these lines:

crosshairs.png crosshairs.png
.125 .16666667
0. 0

Yep, the second line specifies the width and height of the sprite.

Play with it - as well as with the .png reference in the first line, and see the effect it has.

Keep playing with it until it's of your liking.

EDIT: I believe an easier way would be to add/modify width/height attributes in the cpt file, from reading the source.

question I like to ask is why crosshairs.png appears twice in the crosshairs.spr file.

Once is for the color channels and another is for the alpha channel.

It's supposed to be like that since bmp, jpeg and other formats don't support alpha channels.

A bit twisted if you ask me.

The .spr file seems to point to the crosshair png file, yet it still shows the simple crosshair sprite. Is the crosshair sprite affected by the resolution? This is on 1680x1050.

I'll have to research the matter. IIRC, if you specify a file="<something>.spr" you get the sprite. If not, you get a simple line-based crosshairs.

But I may be wrong... I'll have to play with it.

ok here's what I did.

I made a copy of the crosshair sprite and renamed it to crosshair_2.png

I edited the crosshairs.spr file to use crosshair_2.png instead. Now it works...