We need to come up with a system for displaying text/messages. I'll admit that I'm not totally familiar with some of the methodologies of displaying text within a 3D game (do they use aprites?; textured quads?; bitmap fonts drawn onto those entities?; ??). You'll notice that for the bots banners I used some sprites and TEXTed their names onto them, which works, but isn't pretty.
I have a system I've used in a couple of (unfinished) programs which is a function you pass a string and some parameters to and it builds a mesh for the string and textures the appropriate areas of a specifically laid out font texture to the mesh. (You can substitute any bitmap font, as long as its laid out the same in the texture)
It's currently set up to build the mesh to a size appropriate to a certain x,y grid at a particular point on the z-axis, but, if you don't mind a monospace font, I could likely re-jigger it to be useful to this project.
Then, its simply a matter of remembering the entity's handle and freeing it as necessary.
(currently, it also supports 'colorizing' the entity, so a white font is best to make use of this)