How to display floating text

Floating text in your servers' lobbies could be helpful to show links, display game/ server information, settings, etc.

The actual code is just under 3 lines long, and uses a few tricks in Among Us to get the effect running.

This can be done entirely server-side, meaning no mods on the clients are required for this to work.

Theory

The "fake text" effect works by abusing two facts of Among Us:

1. Players don't have to have a connection attached to them
2. Players can have any name assigned to them

In particular, the names can follow TextMeshPro, meaning we can add some styles to the text, like in the screenshot above.

Create the plugin

Of course, you'll need to create a plugin to write your code. Have a look at the Creating a Plugin page to get started.

Or, in your Hindenburg directory, just write yarn plugins create floating-text in a command prompt.

Creating the event

If you already know where you want to create your floating text, you can skip this section. Otherwise, a good place to start is simply when the game is created - or, in this case, just before the first player joins.

Floating text property

So we can destroy the text wherever we want, such as when the game starts, we'll have to create a textPlayer property to reference later and assign as the fake player we'll be creating.

@HindenburgPlugin("hbplugin-floating-text")
export class FloatingTextPlugin extends RoomPlugin {
    textPlayer?: PlayerData<Room>;

    ...
}

The ? indicates that the text might not exist yet, or has been destroyed.

Creating the text player

To listen for when the first player joins, we can use the player.setname event, which generally indicates that their client is ready to play.

@EventListener("room.setname")
onPlayerSetNameEvent(ev: PlayerSetNameEvent<Room>) {

}

Now, inside that method, we can simply call Hindenburg's handy createFakePlayer method:

if (this.textPlayer)
    return;

this.textPlayer = ev.room.createFakePlayer();

The check on the first line is used to quit early if the text has already been created; i.e. another player might join later and this event would get fired again.

If we connect to our room now, we'll see our fake player standing around:

Now, all that's left to do is to position the player and set their name to the text that we want:

this.textPlayer.control?.setName("<align=left><color=yellow><size=200%>Welcome to the underground</size></color>\nHow was the fall?" + "\n".repeat(128));
this.textPlayer.transform?.snapTo(new Vector2(-1.5, -10));

This should now give us:

The name can be in the format of the XML-inspired TextMeshPro format, to give our text some style.

The transform?.snapTo(new Vector2(-1.5, -10)); line is used to position the player underneath the lobby beyond the view range of the players. You'll have to change this position and the number of \ns in the "\n".repeat(128) line if you want to move the text down or around.

Destroy when game starts

If you play the game now, you'll notice that the text we had stays around when the game starts:

This isn't ideal, so we can destroy the fake player simply on game start:

@EventListener("room.gamestart")
onGameStart(ev: RoomGameStartEvent<Room>) {
    if (!this.textPlayer)
        return;

    ev.room.removeFakePlayer(this.textPlayer);
}

Note that the if (!this.textPlayer) check is just for type-safety, as this.textPlayer could theoretically be undefined.s