Make it possible to render entity names

[sgolodetz]

For example, it should be possible to render the names of cities in world view. This will make it substantially easier for the player to distinguish between them.

[sgolodetz]

This isn't quite as trivial as I was expecting, because the text needs to be drawn in 3D space - the best way to do it seems to be to draw the text into a texture (with a transparent background) and render a textured billboard at the correct place in 3D. The following links are quite useful:

• http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/17254/579288.aspx
• http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/XNA/Csharp/Series3/Render_to_texture.php
• http://blog.neilreed.co.uk/search/label/RenderTarget2D

[sgolodetz]

As part of this item, I should probably implement a general billboard system, as it would also be useful to render other status information next to entities in a playing area (e.g. a progress bar showing the current construction state of a building).