Godot Engine - Know Your Nodes: YSort

Key Takeaways

welcome to know your nodes this is a series of goodto game Engine videos where we take a single node type and show how it's used maybe you never came across this particular node before or maybe you were just wondering what it's for but hopefully after this you'll have a new tool that you can use in making your own games this installment will be really short and sweet because we're talking about one of the simplest nodes there is the Y sort node so here we have a really common situation I've got a bunch of NPC Sprites that I've made 12 instances of and they just are walking around the map but it looks really unnatural when they cross in front of each other because their draw order isn't always correct right the draw order is just the order that they're listed here in the scene but for example when a Sprite like that right there when the Sprite is higher than another one where it's you know has a lower y value it should look like it's behind it right it feet shouldn't be on top of the other one's head and so you want what you want to do is make the draw order respect the y coordinate of the Sprite and draw it farther back the higher it gets and you could do that in code and it's a really common situation to need to do but gdau has a great node already set up for you to use that and I have it right here in this other scene it's called the Y sort and it couldn't be simpler y sort node has exactly one property enabled whether you wanted to be on or not and I've just taken all these NPCs and I've made them children of Y sort that's it no more configuration nothing else but if I run the scene you will see that none of that weird drawing happens see whenever a Sprite goes is above another one it's automatically behind it and that's it use this node it's your friend all right I'll see you next time