How to find your perfect crosshair?

Have you ever had troubles finding your perfect crosshair? If so, this guide is for you.

Fundamentals

Why do I need crosshair?
Obvious question, isn't it? Croshair helps you aiming -> headshoting -> killing chickens. It's imple as that.

Why do I need this guide?
It will help you understand what you desire.

Which style of a crosshair should I use?
You can change crosshair style by typing cl_crosshairstyle X (where X is a value 0-5) in console. I prefer to use style number 5, but you may want to apply different one. Hop in game and see what works for you. Still, it's just a style, we're yet to talk about appearance of the crosshair.

Styles 1 and 0 are useless. 2,3,5 are dynamic crosshairs, which means that your crosshair will be wider when shooting, jupmping, moving, depending on the value. 4 is a static crosshair.

To dot or not to dot?
Dot can be useful if you set a high value of croshair gap (command cl_crosshairgap), but it can also irritate. It's connected with thickness of the crosshair (cl_crosshairthickness), so when you set up low value of thickness, dot may become almost invisible. In conclusion, dot is not so helpful. At least for me.

This guide is useless so far
Thank your for appreciating my guide.

KEEP IN MIND THAT ALL THE SETTINGS DEPEND ON YOUR IN GAME RESOLUTION!
(Your crosshair looks different on different resolutions)

Size of the crosshair

Big or small - many people ask how big it should be. Wise man once said (me) that big crosshair is good for spraying/fighting at short distance than small one (which is a complete opposition). I had troubles, because of that.

Solution came when I was trying to randomly adjust settings to see what will happen. I found prefect setting: small crosshair, but with a style set to 5. It means that when I spray crosshair is wider, so it's actually bigger. Problem solved.

I'm using size 1 if you ask.

Thickness

There is no good answer for thickness because it should be relevant for other settings, especially size. I use small thickness, because size of my crosshair is also small. As your crosshair is becoming bigger it may be a good idea to adjust thickness.

Small crosshair -> small thickness
Big crosshair->big thickness
If you are using only dot, you change its size by enlarging thickness, so it's a different case.

Gap

If the gap is big you may have troubles with precise aiming, but if it's small you may not be so good at shooting at short distance. I have my gap set to -2, because with a style 5, crosshair is wider when I'm shooting. Easy to spray, easy to aim.

Keep in mind that your actual bullet will land where the center of your gap indicates. You can help yourself with a dot, but as I mentioned it may be irritating. But still, you can play with big gap if you somehow feel the center of the it.

Outline

Outline helps your crosshair to be visible on every surface. However, it may also worsen the corsshair itself, so it's key to set proper value of this setting. In every case you would like to be on small value like 0.5 or 1. If you set it bigger, crosshair will cover too much space.

Useful commands

Here is my crosshair config, but it also shows possible commands that you can use to customize your crosshair. You can feel what each stands for, because usage is within the name.
cl_crosshair_drawoutline "1"
cl_crosshair_outlinethickness "1"
cl_crosshairalpha "200" [alpha is a transparency of the crosshair; in most cases you would like to have it set to 255]
cl_crosshairdot "0"
cl_crosshairgap "-2"
cl_crosshairsize "1"
cl_crosshairstyle "5"
cl_crosshairthickness "1"

We didn't talk about color, but I'm sure you can do it yourself.
cl_crosshaircolor "5"
cl_crosshaircolor_b "50"
cl_crosshaircolor_g "250"
cl_crosshaircolor_r "250"

[BLUR]

style 0 and 1 are useless? rofl

[mjuiok]

I've been messing around with cross hairs and I personally might just use the dot only, because I like to know right where the bullet is going. Though this guide is really nice and I will show to some friends in case they need help too.

[Gummi]

Ahh I saw that I could do negative values for my crosshair thickness but I didn't realize it could be used to make the crosshair smaller when spraying. Thanks for the tip!

[asdfasdfasdfasdfasd]

iam just bein simple here but i just use a size 5 crosshair and a -3 gap and i have no problems honestly

[1969]

Thanks for this guide!