Total removal of Battle HUD / UI

**the Leper King** · November 22, 2020, 08:33 PM

Can some one give me advice on how to go about removing the top left gear icons that open the game menu / advise settings / chat window during a battle? I've attached a picture of it to this post. I don't even know where to find the proper section in the forums to mod the battle UI tho I have seen mods like DarthMod that have their own personalized version.

I know there's a work around to do this by pressing "Shift" + "T" to open the chat window, closing that window, clicking the gear box area, and then point away to make it hide and only appear when you hove over that area. This is a real tedious process and I have to do it before every battle. It also doesn't work in the campaign map.

Shogun 2 has a way to remove everything by pressing "K" on both the campaign and battle map. Rome 2 works the same way. Even Medieval 2 has a method to remove the whole UI. How can I do this with Empire Total War?

I tried adding the Rome 2 keybinding to remove all the UI to the Empire Total War keybindings file "custom_keys.empire_keys" but nothing happens when I press the key during a battle. Any help on how to remove the gear icons or how to mod the UI would be appreciated.

**the Leper King** · November 23, 2020, 04:03 PM

Progress Report:

I did some tinkering with the PackFileManager 4.1.2 and I opened the UI pack file located in the Empire TW data folder. From there I started deleting a few things that might be associated with the top left interface buttons. It was a tiny victory for me because it did erase the icons but it replaced them with white boxes. The files I deleted from the UI pack file were in the "common ui" section. The specific files were "advice_interface_scripts", "skins", and "advice_interface". Anyone know anything about these files or how can change the white box colors to be transparent instead?

A mod I just tried today, Imperial Splendour, has a feature in the campaign map that makes these icons hidden by default and only visible when you hover over the area. I'll try to find this function in the UI pack file and see if I could apply it to the battle icons as well.

I added more pictures on my current progress.