Labels for Hud Buttons and maybe other questions

I am playing with making a very simple HUD to control animations.

I have at present 4 cubes in a row, linked, as my HUD.

One cube is red, it's the stop button and is the main button because it does the actual stopping and starting of animations and it also holds the animations.

The other cubes are the buttons used to start the animations. When you click one them, it sends a link message to the main cube, which then stops the previously selected animation and starts the newly selected animation.

The main cube loops through it's inventory at an early stage in the process, sending link mesages with animation names to the controller buttons, which then display these names with llSetText.

My question is what is the best way to have the settext appear on top of a prim to click on instead of floating above the prim.

I can see how to do it in a simple way, just use an extra row of prims, one for dispaying the names and the other for clicking on, but this seems like a stupid way to have to do things.

Obviously one could make textures with the names of the animations but that is a pain.

Is there a clever, sneaky way around this?

I haven't tried (since I always make a prim especially for the llSetText), but perhaps some clever combination of cutting a prim in half and stretching (since it appears at a set distance from the center)?

I'll have to experiment.

EDIT: it works with something like top shear on a cube well enough.

You can try using the llSetText script and moving around the location of the text. Try changing around the vector coordinates.

doesnt matter what the text is, its gonna be set something above the prim



and the only vector in set text defines color

llSetText(string text, vector color, float alpha)

Oh, I had thought llSetText used coordinates to choose where it goes.

Good thinking... gave it a quick try myself.

Rotated the prim round y first (45 degrees I tried), the set top shear x to -50.
With some tweaking, might be possible to get text more centrally positioned in vertical axis.

Almost certainly going to use this in future.

I was going to post a pic, but no option to do so

I just use two prims. One small full alpha one, which has the float text script, and the other the background one. When I attach the HUD device I edit it and move the float text prim around until it's properly aligned.

edit: which is your "obvious way" above... but I couldn't find a good way to easily combine nice textures on the background with any other method

I wish

For the DarkLife Hud and other recent hud things I've done, I did basically what Aliasi said - take a single prim and cut it and rotate it until the text appears on top of the button, this has worked great for me. Tho I didn't have to sheer them at all if I remember right, just adjusted the cut so that the bottom 1/2 of the cube only remained, and then flipped it upside down... If nobody else beats me to it I'll try to post the exact process when I get home, if necessary.