OpenArena Message Boards

Several motivations behind these ideas, mainly:
- UI can be overwhelming, displays too much infos, is confusing for gameplay
- UI sometimes takes a large width/height with small resolutions screens
- Could help with video making

Suggestions:
- being able not to display score tab after each frag
- being able to display our own frags elsewhere (in a smaller way)
- being able to keep own health displayed, while removing armor/weapon and the rest (useful in "allrockets" "instagib" mods)
- generally, more modularization of elements cg_draw* elements: being able not to display number of flags
- (less important) being able not to display the chat
- (hitchhicker's idea) being able to draw team health over their head

At the moment, I know it is possible hide to all 2D HUD (cg_draw2d=0), to remove some icons (cg_drawicons=0), to remove the status bar (cg_drawstatus=0), and to completely remove all console messages (from both onscreen notify and from console itself! cl_noprint=1).
Setting con_notifytime "0" (instead of it default, 3, that shows console message on-screen for three seconds) shows them for just an instant. I'm sorry it's not the same thing you are asking for, and it does not affect only chat, but also system messages.

I see here http://joz3d.net/html/q3console.html that there are some cvars related to team chat messages:
cg_teamChatHeight "8"
cg_teamChatsOnly "0"
cg_teamChatTime "3000"
but I can't try them effectively, since for some unknown reasons (oa 0.8.5 bugs? incomplete bot chat files?), bots ignore my team commands (I write commands from say_team feature, or from ESC menu.. and they ignore me!); even enemy bots do not answer to my taunts...

I don't think it's that bad actually. There are many games with a far worse (=more complicated and/or containing more items) HUD/UI.

Step 1: don't play OA for some time
Step 2: Inadvertedly put your screen @ 640x480 (probably other resolutions too)
Step 3: play an active Allrockets game

Expected result: you would find OA's GUI could be much better.

Will try that soon

Tried it, didn't notice much. Might be because I always play 800x600 on a full HD screen already - any other resolution seems to mess with my mouse accel and sensitivity.