Cam 3D2D trouble.

[Noxic]

I'm having a little hard time understanding how 3D2D works. I'm trying to draw text at world positions, and the way I understand it I should use cam.Start3D2D(worldpos, angle-of-2D-surface, scale-of-2D-surface), and then just use draw.DrawText, and that which X/Y coordinates I use there make absolutely no difference (though I'm probably wrong about that). Could someone explain what I'm misunderstanding? Because when I do this, I can't see text -anywhere-.

[Wizard of Ass]

Post the code you are using.

[Noxic]

[lua]

local function DrawText()
local color = Color( 0, 0, 0, 0 ) -- Black text
local selfpos = LocalPlayer():GetShootPos() -- Player's face

for ID, texttbl in pairs(chattbl) do
local ent = ents.GetByIndex(ID)
if ent and ent:IsValid() then

local pos = ent:GetPos() + Vector(0, 0, ent:OBBMaxs().z) -- Above entity
local ang = (pos - selfpos):GetNormal():Angle() -- Facing player's face
for i, tbl in ipairs(texttbl) do
color.a = math.Clamp(tbl[2] * 25, 0, 255) -- tbl[2] is the time (in tenths of a second) that text will be shown; It's lowered in a function hooked to think. This should make it fade out during the last second.

cam.Start3D2D(pos + Vector(0,0,i * 10), ang, 10) -- Draw 2D elements at position in 3D world? *shrug* Also, draw it further above the position if there are several texts to show.
draw.DrawText( tbl[1], "Default", 0, 0, color, TEXT_ALIGN_CENTER )
cam.End3D2D()
end
else
chattbl[ID] = nil
end
end

for _, tbl in ipairs(texttbl) do

local pos = selfpos + tbl[2] -- Basicly, this is text shown to be originating from a direction. tbl[2] is a normalized vector pointing at the direction the text came from.
color.a = math.Clamp(tbl[3] * 25, 0, 255) -- tbl[3] is the time it's shown in this case.

cam.Start3D2D( pos, (pos - selfpos):GetNormal():Angle(), 10)
draw.DrawText( tbl[1], "Default", 0, 0, color, TEXT_ALIGN_CENTER )
cam.End3D2D()
end
end
hook.Add("PostDrawOpaqueRenderables", "AdvHear_DrawText", DrawText)[/lua]

EDIT: Just made some changes to the code. Added comments too. I'm probably gonna have to change the angles but I should at least be able to see the text, right?

[Wizard of Ass]

-snip-

[Noxic]

I just tried changing the text so it's white, and now when I use a command to print text where the player's looking, I notice white pixels forming a skewed line. The line seems to start in the general direction I printed the text, and end about 180 degrees to the right. It's tilted however and doesn't start exactly where I printed the text.

EDIT: Lowering the scale made the line considerably shorter. Is it printing outside the surface? Is that even possible?

[Wizard of Ass]

You didn't translate the angle properly, look at the gmod wiki page on cam.Start3d2d about that.

[Noxic]

-snip-

Well, it works. Thanks for your help :)