Has anyone implemented displaying a character name above a characters head? I'm starting to look into how to do this and figured I would see if anyone has done this and if I could get any tips.

In draw game:

Thanks Chris. Actually that is the "simplified" way to do it but doesn't take into account whether or not the character is in the players view so will display the text on the screen even if the camera is facing away from the character. Also, this is just drawing text over everything rendered in the screen which means that it doesn't get clipped by scene objects. The name really needs to be displayed as if it's part of the 3D scene and his hidden by objects and only drawn if in the camera frustum, etc.

Maybe you can render the name to a texture and apply that to a billboard which is always placed over the player's head. I'm not sure how to do any of this though.

Yes, I was thinking along those lines too. I did manage to include frustum culling for the simplified method so now the text is only displayed if the character is in view but the problem of drawing over the scene will still be an issue with that method.

I think I have something that works out ok by just scaling the text based on distance from camera, having a max distance where it is drawn, and only drawing if the character mesh is in the frustum.

To hide it if it's behind another object (to avoid drawing over the scene), you could additionally perform a raycast to the camera.

Yes, I am working on that aspect now. It is kind of working for me but I have to do some debugging because it's not exactly right yet. One thing I haven't figured out yet is how to exclude the Player Character from the Ray test. Since the camera is at the player, the Ray intersects the player unless I force the origin of the ray to be slightly forward of the player.

you can set the player capsule to a specific actor group and then exclude it in the bit field of Physics.ray

or you can specify callback function for the method, inside function skip actors whose Actor::obj points to your player object.

Using a callback function works. Thanks for the idea.