Fadenkreuz 🎯

Your own crosshair in the exact centre of the screen – drawn by you, running on about 1 MB of RAM. A tiny Windows overlay that sits on top of your game, lets every click pass through, and shows whatever you drew in its editor. Neon green on black by default.

Deutsche Fassung — the editor and the setup speak 14 languages.

Right: the middle of four screens at full height, the crosshair at its real size relative to the screen – this is how small it can look in a game.

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What for

Some games have no crosshair, a poor one, or hide it while you shoot from the hip. Fadenkreuz puts your own on top: exactly in the middle of the main screen, always in front, and clicks go straight through to the game.

Tools like Crosshair X do the same through the Xbox Game Bar – which works well, but the Game Bar itself takes a lot of memory, and while gaming there is often none to spare. Fadenkreuz is a 55 KB native program without any runtime. Running, it needs about 1 MB, of which only around 0.2 MB is its own; the rest are Windows libraries that every program shares.

Two parts, installed separately

Fadenkreuz – the overlay	written in C, no frameworks. Reads Documents\Fadenkreuz\fadenkreuz.bmp and picks up every change within a second.
Editor – for drawing	a single page that opens as its own slim Edge window. It only uses memory while it is open.

In the installer you choose both or just one of them. They do not depend on each other: the overlay runs without the editor, and the editor draws without the overlay running.

Getting started

1. Download Fadenkreuz-Setup-1.2.3.exe from the releases. Windows will say "unknown publisher" – the setup is not signed, because that costs money. Continue via More info → Run anyway.
2. Choose Install for me only (no admin rights needed) or Install for all users, then the parts you want.
3. Start Fadenkreuz: a green cross appears in the middle of the screen.
4. Open Fadenkreuz-Editor, draw, click Save as … once and save as fadenkreuz.bmp in Documents\Fadenkreuz. The editor remembers the file; with live switched on, every stroke shows up on screen within a second.

Keys

Ctrl+Alt+F9	hide / show the crosshair
Ctrl+Alt+F10	press it inside a game: from now on the crosshair only appears while that game is in front. Press again to remove the game.
Ctrl+Alt+F12	quit – or simply start Fadenkreuz a second time

The editor

• Tools: pencil, eraser, line, ring, filled oval, fill and colour picker; the right mouse button always erases.
• Mirroring left/right, top/bottom or four ways – a symmetrical crosshair in a few strokes.
• Outline 0 to 4 pixels in any colour and opacity, optionally fading out softly.
• Templates: cross, cross + dot, dot, round dot, T, X, ring + dot and White oval – a white oval with smoothed edges and a soft black outline. Size, thickness and gap are adjustable.
• My crosshairs: save your own designs under a name, load them with one click, and back them all up to a file (or read them back in, e.g. on another PC).
• Preview at true size (1:1), 2× or 4× against a game-like scene, dark or light.
• Undo and redo, adjustable field size, a pixel-exact grid that marks the centre.

Edge and Chrome save straight into the file. Firefox cannot do that and downloads the image instead.

Only in certain games

Press Ctrl+Alt+F10 while a game is in front, and Fadenkreuz writes it to Documents\Fadenkreuz\programme.txt. As long as that list has entries, the crosshair only shows while one of those programs is in front – switch to the desktop and it disappears. An empty list means: always visible. You can also edit the file by hand, one .exe name per line.

On top of everything (optional)

Normally the crosshair is an "always on top" window: above your game, but below the Start menu, taskbar pop-ups and some overlays. If you choose Install for all users, the installer offers Show on top of everything.

Windows only allows that (it is called UIAccess, the same as for the on-screen keyboard) for signed programs inside Program Files. So the setup creates a certificate that is only valid on this PC, signs Fadenkreuz with it and deletes the private key immediately afterwards – nobody can sign anything else with it. Uninstalling removes the certificate again. If anything goes wrong, the normal version stays in place.

Limits

• Main screen only.
• Exclusive fullscreen games draw over every overlay. Switch the game to borderless or windowed fullscreen.
• Anti-cheat: Fadenkreuz does not touch the game – it is a separate window. Still, a few competitive games dislike overlays; check before playing ranked.
• The editor speaks 14 languages (English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Turkish, Russian, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Korean). It follows your browser’s language and has a language list in its top bar. The setup speaks the same languages, Hindi as my own machine translation because Inno Setup does not ship one.

Image format

fadenkreuz.bmp is a 32-bit BMP with transparency, or a 24-bit BMP in which magenta #FF00FF counts as transparent – so even Paint works. With an odd size the centre pixel lands exactly on the centre of the screen.

Where Fadenkreuz looks for its files, in this order: a folder or .bmp given as argument → the folder named in a datenordner.txt next to the exe → the exe’s own folder, if a fadenkreuz.bmp already lies there (portable use) → Documents\Fadenkreuz.

Privacy

Fadenkreuz never connects to the internet: no counting, no update check, no accounts. The editor is a local file without any outside resources. Your presets live in the browser’s storage and in files you save yourself.

Building from source

You need Visual Studio or the Build Tools with the C++ workload, and Inno Setup 6 for the installer. Then:

bauen.bat

That produces build\fadenkreuz.exe, build\fadenkreuz-oben.exe (the UIAccess variant) and build\Fadenkreuz-Setup-1.2.3.exe. The version lives in bauen.bat and src\fadenkreuz.rc. The icons are drawn by tools\icons.py (Python with Pillow).

Folder	Contents
src/	the overlay in C, resources, icon
editor/	the editor page and its icon
installer/	Inno Setup script and the UIAccess helper
tools/	icon generator
docs/	screenshots

Licence

MIT – see LICENSE. © 2026 Dennis_mit_2n

Part of the workshop at dennismit2n.github.io.