Over a decade after first threatening to do this, here it is...

System Shock 2 Minimal HUD v2
16 Mar 2020
by ZylonBane

This mod minimizes the "shoot" mode HUD as much as possible.
The "use" mode HUD is unchanged.

The mod makes the following changes:
- Changes crosshair to a small transparent dot.
- Changes enemy health bars to thin single-colored lines.
- Reduces size of targeting brackets.
- Removes background for object descriptions at top of screen.
- Removes health/psi frame and slims down bars.
- Removes weapon info frame. A transparent black background is
  retained so text is still legible against light environments.

If used with SHTUP, this should be placed at a higher priority in the mod manager.
Note that this incorporates the Minimal Health Bar mod, so you don't need to install both of them.

The descriptive text isn't centered for anything; it's all flush left in the box that I removed. You can still see the box when hovering over things in Use mode.

Yup, the brackets are useful, but I was going for FULL MINIMALISM! with this.

Some pretty loops you got there! 

I wonder: Is it (easily) possible to implement Thief-style frobbin in SS2, meaning a slightly brightened overlay on a currently selected object?

Interesting mod. Checked it out for an hour or so. I never realized how much I used the brackets to distinguish whether or not I'm hovering over an item.

One (very) minor annoyance is that flavor text that appears at the top center of the screen isn't... well, centered for shorter description texts, as seen in the attached picture to the original post. Obviously this is no fault of the mod, but I guess isn't as noticeable with the normal box that appears. Still, this is a very clean way to play the game, and one I'm likely to use for quite a while!

If you still want the brackets, it's easy to get them back by manually deleting all of the png files starting with "brack" inside the mod folder.

I find it to be an acceptable compromise between minimalism and functionality.


[interface_example.jpg expired]

It would certainly be possible to make the corner brackets into dots, or make them transparent, etc.

Good. The cross-hair could be a tiny bit bigger. It's quite hard to see it sometimes.

If you can get a majority vote from the people who've tried this mod that the crosshair should be bigger, I'll make it bigger.

This is awesome. I love how there are so many little mods coming out now to just polish the little edges of the game and modernise it a bit. It's great. It's like a ....ahem.... rebirth...... of System Shock 2

I fixed an issue this mod had in Use Mode

This mod minimizes the "shoot" mode HUD as much as possible.
The "use" mode HUD is unchanged.

Working as designed.