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[Orz]

In Minecraft MP servers, you can see other players' names even when they're underground.  The text is rendered at the same scale and location it would be if the view were unobstructed.  Does anyone know how this effect is achieved?

[Eigen]

By mapping/projecting a 3d coordinate to screen space.

Something like this but there are numereous other code snippets out there as well.

[Thomas Hiatt]

Couldn't you also just render them with depth testing disabled and after all the other stuff?

[Orz]

Couldn't you also just render them with depth testing disabled and after all the other stuff?

Yeah, that was it.  I figured they would have used the laziest solution .  Thanks!

[soryy708]

glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT);
// render scene
glClear(GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT);
// render names

[Polly]

@soryy708 - Although that works .. i'd recommend the approach Thomas suggested instead

Code:

glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT);
glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST);
// render scene
glDisable(GL_DEPTH_TEST);
// render names

[powly]

The method suggested by soryy has the benefit of correctly rendering names that occlude each other - otherwise they're equivalent (well, an additional clear might cost you some marginal time but your problems lie elsewere if you hit performance problems with it)

[Polly]

The method suggested by soryy has the benefit of correctly rendering names that occlude each other

For a monotone pixel-font ( as used in Minecraft ) this doesn't matter .. and for "modern" fonts that use transparency you need to depth-sort instead. But in principle you're right of course