Free “Shoot OFF” Software

Post date: Sep 3, 2014 4:03:40 PM

The free (open source) laser dry firing software Shoot OFF allows anyone to hook up a webcam to their Windows/Mac/Linux desktop or laptop and use any laser dry firing adapter to practice their trigger control. The software tracks your “shots” and displays your hits and can even score your targets. This software usually retails commercially for around $300.

It was received three updates since I first blogged about it last year. New features include:

An integrated shot timer.
Shot markers are now the same color as the laser detected.
Users can now configure ShootOFF to ignore lasers of a certain color (for example if you are using a red laser sight with a green dry fire adapter).
ShootOFF is now more configurable to work with nearly any laser trainer under reasonable lighting conditions.
Training protocols can now make use of the detected laser color (e.g. Shoot for Score now keeps score per laser color, enabling friendly competition with a friend).
The training protocol infrastructure has been enhanced in about a dozen ways to make it easier to implement feature rich protocols.
The GUI now looks more native to the system you’re running it on (i.e. less ugly).
Dozens of bug fixes (they have not received a single bug report for the current stable release, which has been out for 9 months!).

Now you might be wondering what is the catch, how can this software be free? There is no catch, that is the beauty of open source. You are even free to modify the software source code (if you are a programmer who understands these things). To encourage contributors, they are now hosting the source code on the popular GitHub collaboration platform, making it easy to contribute code.