Driver Madness

Experiment
Removing the HUD

Briefing
It is time to remove that annoying HUD, it has annoyed us screenshot and video takers for the last time.

Method
I deleted the hud related files so the game was unable to use it. These HUD related files are located in the overlays folder. [more detailed instructions coming soon]

Result
Finally I was able to successfully remove the in game HUD. Now I can take some crystal clear realistic videos and screenshots to show the world what Driver: Parallel Lines is made of.

However there are a few problems I can't quite put my finger on, there are a few problems causing flashing textures just like in driv3r and there are areas displayed with a weird polygons. The problem isn't that bad but I'm working on other ways around this.

Videos (Here are some videos which show this happening in real time)
coming soon
Images (Here are some standalone images)
Main
coming soon
Problems

i love the idea of no HUD. but it can sometimes be rather difficult to operate without them. Thats why games without them you can just press a button and they pop up for a few seconds.

or even like in "The Getaway" sounds in the game demonstrate that the character is almost dead and the way the character moves and things like that.

The getaway did a fairly good job at doing this and you can easily tell if your going to die or not by the expression on the character your playing.

I like it how in games if you are injured you walk slower or limp or something like that. it makes it much more realistic and the lack of a hud and awesome graphics make it kore like life which is what i love about new games.

The only problem I see is if you walking slower you have to put up with walking slow which can get annoying, especially if you ruin your ride and you in the middle of no where and you are surrounded with fences when you get closer to the city and then with you slow speeds you have to find a exit.

I guess that's what they mean by gameplay, it can be very realistic but the gameplay would have been quite low.

But removing the HUD will increase the speed of gameplay so maybe it won't matter AS much.

I don't see how it'll go any faster. If you mean not having to load a HUD the hud is only about 800kb, when over 100MB of textures are loaded into the game while your playing it already.

Yeah thats a good point i guess. i wasn't really thiking in terms of file size. but there must be a marginal improvement. or atleast the game would looking like it moves more smoothly without the extra clutter on the screen.

madness wrote:…It is time to remove that annoying HUD, it has annoyed us screenshot and video takers for the last time.

One more nice thing about having a replay, I guess.

madness wrote:The only problem I see is if you walking slower you have to put up with walking slow which can get annoying, especially if you ruin your ride and you in the middle of no where and you are surrounded with fences when you get closer to the city and then with you slow speeds you have to find a exit.

I guess that's what they mean by gameplay, it can be very realistic but the gameplay would have been quite low.

Yah, sometimes more realistic can mean less fun. Maybe time for a speed option, like the command in simulators where you have to fly or drive a long way, you can press a key to cycle through like 2X, 4X, 8X to speed things up if that part of the game bores you.

Removing the HUD is the next best thing to having a replay feature. Well it's almost the next best thing, the next best thing is using that camera hack I was talking about.

Additionally I have added some more information and images to the main post. Soon I'll be adding better instructions as well as a video and more screenshots of the game with no HUD.

Removing the HUD is the next best thing to having a replay feature. Well it's almost the next best thing, the next best thing is using that camera hack I was talking about.

And how is that going at the moment?

They should have included a film director in the game. maybe you can find that hidden in the game files somewhere.

There is defiantly no hidden film director.
I also worked out and added to the topic that removing the hud can be a little glitchy.
and that camera hack thing may never happen, I've been trying to contact the expert in the memory hacking area and he hasn't been contactable ever since the start of this year.

In D3 i removed something in the overlays folder called white.gfx which caused quite a lot of things to turn black... it seems that is what happened in the top picture... but then again i could be wrong.

With TexMod you can extract the textures and fonts used for the hud. So if we can can make them transparent it wouldn't be visible ingame any more. The problem will be the map in the radar, because it's no texture.

nice find!
the map on the radar could be a problem. Maybe it's possible to find the texture somewhere else if it's loaded from a external file.

Ok, here it is:

No HUD Mod 2006

All the hud elements were removed. Known problems: If you are chased by the police, the unvisible radar will flash. The flashing has nothing to do with textures, so I couldn't turn it off. The map in the pause menü is disabled (black screen).

Installation: Extract the archive to you hard drive. Copy the file "HUD-now.gfx" to the folder "Overlays" and the file "levels.txt" to the folder "Cities" and overwrite the old files. Don't forget to make backup.



Video:

nice to see some sort of a mod released, I guess the only way we can change it to stop it from flash would be to somehow the flash variables to 0 in the "driverparallellines.exe" I think that's the most likely place for it to be.

Someone was in there and wiped out the weapons by mistake but didn't know how he did it

[hr]

anyways when I get back from holiday I'll start releasing some of the other mods and findings I've been working on.

fun mod, but NO MAP?! :/ and i wish only one thing wasnt removed from hud, its health bar... anyway good job keep it up!

experienced crash on vista, while restarting game after get killed.

with the TexMod application JAY found it should be possible to put some things in and leave somethings out!

Yeah, it should be no problem. But I thought for making screenshots or videos it would be the best if the complete hud elements are gone.