Pause banner removal

Is there any chance that massive PAUSED banner can be removed or placed out of the way somewhere? For the purposes of active pause in single player, the pause banner has a very large "deadzone" around it making it difficult to issue orders properly. Aside from, well, blocking your view, obviously.

Any modders that could point me in the right direction aswell? I'll happily have a go at it myself if it's a no-go here.

+1 This sounds like a job for the mighty @wondible or @cola_colin, masters of PA UI modding

Moved to modding discussion.
I think this kind of mod would be a nice and simple to do mod for a beginner in modding PA, assuming the person has some programming and webdevelopment knowledge or is willing to learn about that.
Here a few hints on how I would go about it:

1) create an empty mod that loads one file into the scene "live_game_paused_popup". So basically for example copy this mod here: https://github.com/pamods/UnlimitedPlayers and remove the unlock file, instead add some other js file and modify the modinfo.json, with all the obvious data (name, etc) and make it have only the scene live_game_paused_popup with the new js file you created.
2) enable the newly created mod that so far has an empty js file that is loaded in the pause scene, start PA, start a vs AI game with the AI having 0 resources and then pause the game.
3) have a look at /media/ui/main/game/live_game_paused_popup.html
4) add javascript into the empty js file of your mod to modify the html file via jQuery. Depending on what you want to do you might also want to have a look at the corresponding js file and have a look at how knockout works here: http://learn.knockoutjs.com/ You mod code is loaded before knockout is bound to the html, so your mod can insert knockout-stuff as well.

Notice that the UI debugger (Coherent/Debugger/Debugger.exe) is extremely helpful to experiment and debug your mod. If you want to know what it does, look up some tutorial on using the Chrome DevTools

Mmm no success alas. Anyone with more proficiency with any luck?

Alrighty- feeling adventurous this evening. Cola_Colin, thank you for your earlier feedback- I have however zero experience in html or java. My programming expertise is limited to industrial stuff and is thus quite a different language. ( you lost me halfway your first sentence )
If I may be so rude to call upon your time and aid, I'll have a go at it myself regardless.

As I REALLY want to play this thing after so long, here it goes!

I've had a look at... /media/ui/main/game/live_game_paused_popup. There's three of them- no idea what to do with the html one, but I'm seeing some more or less recognisable things in the .CSS file. (good ol' wordpad)

I'm thinking it might be possible to simply adjust the size of the window, and the location, by changing some of the hight & width values. Am I correct in thinking Body {height and {width affects the size of the actual window?

Not sure where the no-click zone is tied in though.

I've taken the brute force method and just changed every single hight and width numeric in the CSS file to 50% instead of 100%. Mission success: the pause box is now in fact a smaller box off to the middle left of the screen, and I can now click in the middle as well! I'll now continue trying every single one, one at a time. I'll keep you informed.
And yes. I am aware this is totally not the right way to do it, but it's the fastest way I can think of without actually picking up javascript

The no-click area seems to be linked to the shadow of the window.

Got it working nicely now.

In the file "live_game_paused_popup.css", I have changed:

body{
height to 1%;
width to 8%;

.div_panel_primary_msg {
font-size to 20px;


input[type="button"] {
font-size to 15px.



The end result:

When pressing pause during a single player skirmish, the pause banner now appears in the top left corner, out of the way. The entire screen is now clickable.

Not sure why the banner conveniently moved to the corner by just changing those sizes, but not complaining

Any suggestions on how to tidy it up a bit?

now the only thing I'd still need to know, is how to pour it into an actual mod format, rather than fiddling with the actual game files. Thoughts?

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction, Cola_colin!

I am baffled on how you went about this.

It's not far away from how I would have worked on it to find the changes I want to make, though I would have read the html and directly only changed the css required. Or maybe just add another css class that does the trick.

Anyway once you have found the css/html modifications you want to make you need to package up a UI mod, use the existing one I linked above as an example, and write a piece of javascript code that dynamically applies your changes to the game while the UI of the game is created.
So yeah: A clean mod needs javascript for this. You can't ignore it

Hah, I'll leave that to someone with at least some basic knowledge with it then

Reading a HTML file is where you'd lose me. Figured I'd try brute force, with a bit of luck and experience in tampering, it'd be more time efficient than actually pick up javascript from scratch, just for this. Luck was on my side!
It's funny- I used to program robots for a living. This must be how people felt like when I tried to explain something, hah hah. Never really got the "I don't care how it works, as long as it works" expression.

Anyway, I'd like to thank you again for pointing me in the right direction Cola_colin, I'll definitely be enjoying this gem of a game a hell of a lot more, and I can think of a few who'll be enjoying planet busting for the first time now.


Anyone willing to have a go at slapping this into a neat little mod, go crazy!