Are you ever going to improve every single low resolution textures in the game?

The original S3 reticles were so low-res it was really surprising to me that it was possible to create new reticles that were fairly highly detailed.  It is kinda fun to make them because the possibilities are limitless but I have to say that S3 is a nightmare with anti-aliasing in the reticle image that will give a neon pink halo around the reticle unless there is absolutely zero anti-aliasing around the edges.  It's like a very unforgiving, primitive transparency map with zero tolerance for pixels that blend at all.  It forces me to use photoshop like it's microsoft paint.

Remind me again, I take it that the files you are working with are using Swat 3's odd way of doing transparency with the magenta (pink)? Just like the font files.

Yes, the reticles function somewhat like an alpha channel transparency map where any pixel with even the slightest hint of pink will show up as that magenta color.  It is cool that they put that functionality in there way back when because it allows a lot of freedom for playing around with the FPS POV where you can use highly detailed graphics of anything you could want.  It is just that the edges can't have any anti-alisasing so it can be a bit of a chore cleaning up pixels that can't even be detected with the naked eye yet have some tint of magenta that S3 is detecting.  It is a labor of love making these faux reticles lol.  

When I returned to S3 in 2010 for the first time after my original 1999-2001 run and compiled the BlueLight mod I was really fired up about using the handsup console command with the higher poly gun models for the M4, MP5, AK and some of the pistols that modders had brought into the game.  That was my main motivation for compiling BlueLight because handsup always looked terrible with the original low res gun models and textures from sierra but with the high res ones I thought it looked cool.  After taking another lonnnnggg break from S3 and gaming altogether for more than the last decade until the past few months when my 16yo spontaneously felt nostalgic and downloaded it leading me to fall back down the S3 rabbit hole once again, I have taken another look at handsup and I have mixed feelings about it.  Sometimes it looks cool but more often than not the player mesh is holding the gun so low that you barely see it, particularly with SMGs.  Also, a lot of times that player mesh and gun go invisible and you have to look down and back up again for them to reappear.

I had actually fooled around with reticles in some joke mods that I made during that 2010 era when I was linked up with copycat and the lads in DnC, so I knew about that possibility back then but was so focused on making handsup work that I never took it too seriously.  It wasn't until recently with my revisiting S3 that I saw this mod;

www.moddb.com/mods/vswat3/page/2#comments

Whoever that modder is they did a nice job with their reticles, too bad it seems that they never did release it.  I have come across a pretty decent mod from someone who screen shotted the Swat 4 POV and made reticles with them.  The one reticle that I have made so far that I think really enhances gameplay is the tactical shield, I get a kick out of messing with tangos danger close with that extra protection and not having to worry about getting one shotted with a glock.