Z Order Questions (Solved)

[WhiteBoxDev]

Hi there,

I noticed in the default render script that the tile predicate is drawn with depth testing disabled. This should mean that the z position of sprites shouldn’t be taken into consideration when drawing in a orthographic projection.

Are sprites ordered by their z position in the engine before drawing? And if not, what mechanism is causing z ordering to work without a depth buffer?

[Mathias_Westerdahl]

Correct. We sort all the renderable items with the same predicate into batches using the Z value.

You can read more about draw calls and batches in this great forum post:

Draw calls and Defold

I am by no means an expert in this field, but sometimes I think about performance. Here is some thoughts about draw calls in Defold. Draw Calls What is a draw call? In a one liner: “A command that tells the GPU to render a certain set of vertices as triangles with a certain state (shaders, blend state and so on). A command like this is often more than one object.” A batch is a term that is basically means multiple commands that share the same state. If you are curios of a more in depth explan…