Mission accomplished. Minimap removed entirely, left the health bar at like 20% opacity. Should have turned the text 50% grey (and will before I post the patch.dat/fat files) but here's a shot:
There are other options available here. For example I could leave some of the icons at any level of opacity even without the big terrain rendering. Or you could put the health bar's opacity back up. Or remove it entirely. The text, as I said, is a mystery to me for now aside from changing its color.
Here's the basic version. This includes the following changes:
-Everything is now gone from the minimap. No icons, no terrain rendering, nothing's left. The world map is unchanged.
-Health bar is about 40% opacity (it's more visible than the screenshot above). Same for the armor bar.
-The health packs remaining text is no longer white, instead a neutral grey. I couldn't figure out how to make it disappear entirely without introducing a blank font.
-The distance to waypoint text is unchanged. I couldn't find this in any .FEU file, and even if I did the best I could do is make it a different color.
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/45455626/FC...ap_40pHBar.zip
I might make some other variations if anyone's interested. For example I could put some of the icons back, or make a version with no health/armor bars at all. More importantly feel free to use what I did in your own mod. The files to get rid of the terrain rendering are in _UNKNOWN/gfx, there are 12801 of them and they're 1kb each (9kb if you go get them from your own fc3_main.dat). You also want the transparent "unknown" and "underground" minimap textures in ui\singleplayer\textures\hud\minimap (this is also where you find the textures for the fill on the health/armor bars).