[sjm]

It did but it was not enabled by default IIRC. Also fun fact the "crosshair" in original Quake was limited to only the character "+" from the character set. QuakeWorld later introduced a "crosshair 2" which was a slightly more complicated bitmap that you could change the color of.

[huesatbri]

And the “+” was slightly off center as well if I remember correctly.

[lloeki]

My memory is fuzzy, there might not even had one at all in the first version. I had one of the first publicly distributed one (on a promo CD) and I remember it sure lacked a lot of stuff that were present down the road, IIRC even early 3dfx and then glquake had a bit more console options.

As for alignment, well at 320x200 (or 240 if your video card+monitor could manage):

- the crosshair might have been on the HUD layer which was pixel-aligned.

- 2px wide would have been quite wide, and 1px would have been off centre.

Tradeoffs tradeoffs.

I remember thinking that Doom had this "always looking down the sights" feel and Quake inherited that but the 3D aspect of it was more like the weapon felt belly height instead of shoulder height.

Since weapon was centered it wasn't too hard to aim horizontally, but Quake having 3d look up down and LOS hitscan line (vs Doom which hit the first enemy along a vertical plane) made Q hard-ish to aim vertically.

[eru]

> - 2px wide would have been quite wide, and 1px would have been off centre.

Off-centre of your monitor, but not necessarily off-centre as far as the game is concerned: it would be trivial to shift everything one (or half?) a pixel to the upper left. Ie so that your shooting direction perfectly aligns with the crosshair. You could do that for any crosshair position.

Even cross-hairs that are off-screen.

[lloeki]

To be fair, I don't think it really mattered, I mean there was so much hackery going on (either because of oversight or as performance tricks)† than a pixel off isn't really a problem.

† such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gNYTqn3qRc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfY96tAqmdI

[tomduncalf]

I seem to recall you had to open the console and type “crosshair 1”. I remember buying a book of all the console commands and various other tips haha