Draw Order by Depth

Hi everyone,

It's been several years since I used Stencyl but I've entered LudumDare46 and I'm looking for some help!

Is there a simple way to have Stencyl order the drawing based on Y value?

I'm just trying to work a depth system for a side on rpg. I've tried some prefabs from StencylForge but none seem to work (unless I've just not configured them correctly but I don't think that's it).

I considered ditching it but I have big trees and it's ruining the look of the game having the player have to run around the big branches etc.


Any help greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Joe

From the top of my head, you can in an Update event set the Z-order of your actors to it's Y position + its height (make that a behavior). That might organize all actors in the same layer by their Y bottoms.

Ah... that's a new block on me.

Doesn't seem to be having the desired effect though, the result is quite erratic. I notice that an actor's z-order never goes above the number of actors in the layer, despite the block trying to set it to a much higher value. Could that be the issue?

I didn't know that the Z order had that limit. Another idea would be to check what your player actor is colliding with, and set it's Z order to the collided actor's -1, or switch the Z order of the two actors.

I think you need to use the z order block in a drawing event in order for It to work.
Try to put z order to y of self for each actor in a drawing event and see if that works.

I think you need to use the z order block in a drawing event in order for It to work.
Try to put z order to y of self for each actor in a drawing event and see if that works.

When I do this, all the Z values are maxed out at the total number of objects in the room. I did get a response from the z-block being in the Update event, just not what was expected - erratic changing of Z positions.

I didn't know that the Z order had that limit. Another idea would be to check what your player actor is colliding with, and set it's Z order to the collided actor's -1, or switch the Z order of the two actors.

Yes it's frustrating.

I've ended up going with a very rough solution.

I've made a behaviour for my character that sets its Z order to 1, then cycles through each actor on screen and checks its Y position. If it's greater, it sets the Z order to 2, if not, 0.

Luckily I only have a handful of objects on screen at once as I suspect this will eat FPS very quickly.

Still very pokey though.

Ah... that's a new block on me.

Doesn't seem to be having the desired effect though, the result is quite erratic. I notice that an actor's z-order never goes above the number of actors in the layer, despite the block trying to set it to a much higher value. Could that be the issue?

If you want to get into the technical details, a "Layer" isn't much different than an "Actor". They're both extensions of the Sprite class. Sprites can be nested into each other. Each sprite has a list of children. In theory, this means you could have "subactors" with some tweaking of the Stencyl engine code. Layers use this functionality, though. Placing an actor into a layer places it into the layer's list of sprites.

The position of the actor in the list of sprites is what 'z-order' refers to.

This (below) is the code snippet I use. The function DrawStackWrapper.actorInFrontOfActor( a, b ) is one I wrote to determine which actor is in front of another. Mine is for isometric perspective. You'd want to replace this function with your own, using the y-value to determine which actor is in front of the other.

Code: [Select]

                var atest:Int = DrawStackWrapper.actorInFrontOfActor( a, b );

                // You'll need to use the code blocks provided in the Flow > Advanced palette to utilize 'swapChildren'
                // a.parent.getChildIndex(a) is the code that the 'z index of actor' block calls
                if ( ( a.parent.getChildIndex( a ) > b.parent.getChildIndex( b ) && atest < 0 ) ||
                     ( a.parent.getChildIndex( a ) < b.parent.getChildIndex( b ) && atest > 0 ) )
                    a.parent.swapChildren( a, b );