Howdy, my previous post got drawn out and probably confused potential helpers, so after letting it fall out of scope, I am trying again. Basically, I would like to write text in 3d coordinates (which is how I draw my tiles, characters, etc). Currently, I can only write text based off of screen coordinates. Meaning, if I wanted to write text to hover above someones head for instance, I would find that persons location, then draw text there, but add a slight offset to make it appear over the characters head. What I have tried: drawing it to a sprite and than translating the sprite to the desired coordinates (how I do it with textures using d3ddevice) which does not work, it translates it to the screen coordinates. So if a player is at 11,11, it would end up writing the text at the top left of the screen, barely off the corner. My question to you is - so how do I do this? Previous suggestions: billboarding (the only stuff I found, including Microsofts example, has to do with using a 2d texture to mimic 3d by having the quad always facing the camera) which I believe meant drawing the text onto the sprite - which I've tried. All help is appreciated, thanks a bunch.

Do you want the text to be true 3D? That is, do you want it to have depth/perspective?

If not, you just have to find the screen coordinates of the location to draw the text (in your example, of the character's head) and draw the text there. D3DXVec3Project() can help you with this.

Ah, thank you, that potentially be helpful.

The true 3d aspect im not so interested in, as I was also suggested something about creating texts out of meshes (I wanted to avoid that if possible).

I think this may help me, thanks. I'll report back my findings.

text seems to always face the camera from what I've noticed.

D3DXVec3Project seems to work for me, but I am a bit confused.

It takes a source vector, is that the difference from where the camera is looking? I.e., if the camera is looking at 47,21, then then the source vector of 1,0, would have the screen coords at 48,21? It seems to work this way for me, as a source of 0,0 is at the center of the screen, and altering the source by 1 seems to essentially shift the numbers over just a bit.

Edit: it seems to be off a bit for the vertical aspect.

When I have the source being a difference in x, the mouse.x value is accurate, but the mouse.y seems to be off quit a bit.. My camera is at an angle, so does that affect anything or should the D3DXVec3Project function accommodate that already?