Imitating a Name Tag?

I remember that I read somewhere that the background of the name tag over avatars heads is a particle. Am I right?

If yes, does somebody knows how to reproduce it with llParticleSystem()? I already know how to do a single steady particle but the effect works only at a fixed distance.

If no, is there another way to do it?

I tried to search the forum but "name" and "tag" are too short.

One cannot overwrite name or group tags with LSL, if that is what you are trying to get at here... one can have an attachment above the head of the avatar concerned which has float text on it, certainly, but it will not look the same.

No, I'm not trying to hide my name tag or to replace it. What I would like to achieve --if possible-- is to imitate a name tag in order to make an object look like an avatar.

in essence you'd just creat a name tag particle, and fire it over the object. I don't know if the actual nametages are REALLY particles, or if that texture background is available by uuid, but it'd be easy enough to create your own in a paint program, along with your custome name....


could be alot of fun for a wax museum type setup... or virtual employees...

My two cents: a) the build in name tags are "intelligently drawn", meaning they are not always drawn about the head, but sometimes to the side with a line leading to the av, or moved down to make it visible. That is hard to do using a particle as far as I can see.
b) One can indeed sometimes hide your tag using an invisiprim, but it has a tendency to fail because of a), as one cannot predict where the SL viewer will render the tag.

Both of the above are based on personal observations, which might have been under influence of bad eyesight

Should be easy enough to replicate in photoshop, just a bit beyond me without doing it in two prims, one for the transparent background one for the text ... but try the texture and graphic exchange group and ask for a texture that is like the name tags

Exactly how Boreal's getting at it.. it's not a particle, but, like paritcles, it's generated client side, and how it appears can differ from client to client, for example it always faces the client viewing it, so if two people are viewing an avatar from different angles, they're seeing the title differently. Also, sometimes, depending on the situation, the tag is drawn away from the avatar with a line being drawn from the avie to the tag. In a basic setup with a clear view to the avatar, the tag is above the head, and I've seen people hide the tag entirely with invisiprims... and you could create a 'replacement' tag that sat above the head, but it wouldnt react like a real tag. You could 'fool' someone for a minute, but before long they'd be able to tell that it's not the real tag.

Since you're trying to make a tag for a prim avatar, what I'd do is this

1. create and stand in front of a white, full bright prim wall.
2. zoom in on your tag
3. take a snapshot and upload to your hard drive.
4. in photoshop, or whatever you use, choose the color picker, and select the color of the tag
5. use the image of the tag as a selection too
6. take that selection and fill it in with that color
7. adjust the transparency to about 50 precent, or whatever looks like a tag
8. add the text using the color picker to get the color of the text
9 save and upload it using alpha channels

If you can create the tag in world.. you can skip all that, take the pic, go into photoshop, and use the color replacer to delete the white and just use that.

The big problem with imitating the name tag is not the facing (particles will do that for you) but rather the size. Name tags are always the same size on screen. The size of particles (and everything else in world other than HUD elements) depends on how far they are from the camera.