flame-engine / flame-engine/flame
Add a RenderLayer system for global render ordering
- Dominant language
- Dart
- Stars
- 10.8k
- Forks
- 1k
- Avg merge
- 1d 20h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 21
Description
## Motivation
`priority` only orders siblings, so the draw order of a component is tied to where it sits in the tree. Games regularly need cross-hierarchy ordering (a health bar above all enemies, a projectile under all UI) and the current workaround is restructuring the tree so competitors share a parent.
## Proposal
A `RenderLayer` system, similar in spirit to Godot's `CanvasLayer` and Unity's sorting layers:
- A `World` (per camera pass) owns an ordered set of layers; each layer has a z-index.
- Components can declare a target layer; their rendering is routed to that layer instead of their tree position, while updating, lifecycle, and hit-testing stay hierarchical.
- Plain `PositionComponent`s are replayed onto their layer using their cached absolute transform. Subtrees with hierarchical render state (clips, decorators, snapshots, custom `renderTree`) stay atomic: they render as a unit at their subtree's layer.
- The flattened-traversal infrastructure from #3957 (structure versioning, lazily rebuilt root-owned lists) carries over directly for maintaining per-layer render lists.
This also follows the design note in #3957 about separating render order from update order, and would give y-sort a render-time home (a layer sorted by `position.y`) with zero structural reordering.
## Out of scope
Arbitrary interleaving of components across clip/decorator boundaries; those subtrees remain atomic within a layer.
Related: #3957, and the "Support a global z-index/priority" item in #1938.
Contributor guide
Assessment
This issue has not been assessed yet.