Controlling z between collection proxies (SOLVED)

Questions
1

I have a general settings dialog in a collection proxy. It can be loaded from different screens around the game. In some of the screens it ends up behind other gui-elements (from other collections). How do I control the order of dynamically loaded collections?

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2

You can’t separate collection content like that. Everything is drawn according to their Z, sorted globally in each respective draw-pass (by render predicate).

3

In the screen where the settings screen ends up behind some other elements, all the gui elements has a z-position of 0. All the elements in the settings gui has a z-position of 1. That tells me the sorting can’t be global? They both have the standard gui-material so they share render predicate as well.

4

Oh, sorry you’re talking about GUI nodes. They are not sorted on Z, no. Not sure how they are sorted. Let me come back to you on this one…

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5

Now I found it. :smile: It’s not tied to collection proxies at all, but you can control the render order of GUI scenes with the function gui.set_render_order() http://doc.defold.com/ref/gui#gui.set_render_order

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6

1 year old necropost incomming!
I haven’t been able to find any info on how to set the order/sorting of individual nodes. I have a data-driven gui that is procedurally generated, so all the gui templates (nodes I use gui.clone_tree() on) reside inside the same gui scene. The logical thing here is that the sorting would be based off the node’s position along z but that doesn’t work atm - in fact the position-z value has no effect what so ever on the ordering.

I know that the location of a node inside the hierachy under Nodes/ determine this somewhat, but afaik you cannot change this with code nor can you “place” a cloned node tree where you want it. Is this a bug, an intentional design or am I doing things wrong?

7

It is correct that z-value is completely ignored in gui scenes. This is well documented and unlikely to ever change. You control the draw order through parent-child hierarchies and/or gui layers.

gui.set_parent() will allow you to move nodes within the node hierarchy. gui.set_layer() will change layer on a node.

8

There’s http://www.defold.com/ref/gui/#gui.move_above and http://www.defold.com/ref/gui/#gui.move_below

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9

I was adviced to use gui.move_above() and gui.move_below() for setting the node order.

So in my update function, I loop through the nodes that needs to be sorted.
Then, for each item in the loop I loop through the nodes one more time (so every node gets compared to every other node) and perform a simple if
gui.get_position(item.gui_node_root).z > gui.get_position(item2.gui_node_root).z then

Then I just use the functions mentioned at the top of this post.

EDIT: The problem that arises from this though (not being able to sort via position.z) is that you need to add in a sorting algorithm there. And it gets confusing as there is no function for doing swapping between two nodes (you can only place one node above another - which is troublematic if there are additional nodes in between these… nodes that might have been processed already). In short: I’m still stuck.

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