Three questions

3. The longer the range of the scanner the further away you can detect ships. Appears to affect draw distance too.

1. I wished they were less distinct too. The appearance may probably be defined somewhere in one of the PFX subfolders but I don't think you can add conditions: modifying it will affect how it appears at any time. Unless the draw conditions are in a script somewhere - not impossible but unlikely. I'd love to be proven wrong though; the select boxes are especially jarring when trying to take screenshots.

Edit:
My bad, you meant the targeting brackets that appear around all ships regardless (allies=green, neutral=yellow, hostile=red). The boundary elipse around your selected pilot/mothership appears to be defined by \Data\TEXTURE\ship_selection.dds; however, that's just the texture. Replacing it with an empty one shows that the elipse is still drawn and highlighted in green. Might be able to find this with a little more digging. The targeting brackets may possibly be found similarly (same texture but 3 different RGB highlights).

[Vanant 2]

I can´t find any texture or file refering to brakets, targeting boxes, selection squares or something like that. Damn, it´s the only thing i´d like to mod and it could be hardcoded. They are inmmersion killers for me. The engine trails are enough to know if a ship is friendly or not.

Possibly. There's a selection_mark.dds but that refers to the bounding around items being tractor beamed. The lines connecting source to target are in helpers.cfg and maphelpers.cfg; you'd think they'd dump targeting brackets in there too since they're so similar (right down to RGB colour spec), but unfortunately no. Might try looking around those scr definition files in \Data\GUI\.

[Vanant 2]

ahhg, i almost had it. the ai.ini file has one parameter called frameWidthMin. changing the values, i can modify the size of the frames, but not get rid of them. not even putting -1, 0, or a big number to send them offscreen. there are limits.

[Vanant 2]

muahahaaha. That file was in russian, so i didn´t understand that two lines changed the behaviour of the frames. Now they are gone.

;ìàêñèìàëüíûé äèàìåòð êîðàáëÿ, ðàìêà äëÿ âèäèìîñòè âêëþ÷àåòñÿ ñ ïðîçðà÷íîñòüþ
;ïðîçðà÷íîñòü ðàìêè ñíèæàåòñÿ ñ óìåíüøåíèåì äèàìåòðà
diameterVisibleMax = 1;
;ìèíèìàëüíûé äèàìåòð êîðàáëÿ, ðàìêà äëÿ âèäèìîñòè âèäíà áåç ïðîçðà÷íîñòè
diameterVisibleMin = 0;



By the way, while looking for this, I´ve found the way to reduce the FOV (no more fish eye effect). Now this is a more realistic game. Love it.

Reduce the FOV how? Btw congrats on the frame thing, I didn't realise it was referring to the targeting brackets.

[Vanant 2]

In the main.ini:

FOV = 70

At least for a 16:10 monitor, 70 is ok.