Change Actor's Z Position?

jillians

I am making a game where you pick something up and put it somewhere else. When i pick up an actor, i want them to sort in front of things so they don't get lost when you place them where they need to go. Right now they are somewhat hidden and occluded by objects until you pick them up, and that is part of the game.

Does anyone have any ideas on this? Can you change Z position? Or the layer on which the actor currently presides?

quantumsheep

You can't currently change the layer order unfortunately.

What I'd do is set up your own set of rules that dictate what gets placed in front of what.

But then, I'm not sure how you'd show that.

Hmmmm....

JohnPapiomitis

well gamesalad is only 2d so theres no z. But if you click the scene tab inside a scene then layers youll see all the layers and be able to make new ones, change there order, order of actors in them, ect

edit: i misunderstood. If your talking about ingame then refer to qs's post above

quantumsheep

Yes, I should have said 'Can't change the layer order *dynamically*'

QS

JohnPapiomitis

quantumsheep said:
Yes, I should have said 'Can't change the layer order *dynamically*'

QS

jillians

doh... Work around solution is to destroy actor, and spawn an actor spawner that respawns the actor on the new layer..... Lets seee if that works!

quantumsheep

jillians said:
doh... Work around solution is to destroy actor, and spawn an actor spawner that respawns the actor on the new layer..... Lets seee if that works!

Good luck!

expired_012

jillians said:
doh... Work around solution is to destroy actor, and spawn an actor spawner that respawns the actor on the new layer..... Lets seee if that works!

Wouldn't all of that spawning hurt performance?

What I would try to do it make a duplicate of whatever your actor you're dragging, set it's alpha to 0, and constrain its X and Y positions to the original actor.
Then you can change that top actors alpha to 0 or 1 whenever it's needed, to make it seem like its going to the "top" or "bottom" layer.

Not sure if that answered your question or was any help at all, but just throwing out ideas here.

jillians

I ended up just working completely around this. Thanks guys for the input. This feature should definitely be considered, z order is a really useful tool.

UtopianGames

We did something similar for the Zanda Template.

What i did was have 2 hero actors and swap them depending on his Y position in relation to objects like trees and fences so the hero can walk in front and behind.

The effect is probably the best solution to layers atm.

I would not recommend lots of spawning.

See video below.



Darren.