Question

My problem is I Have an isometric grid, just based on the X,Y values:
Each time you click a button for instance road than this item is pushed to an array()

 //
 addChild(roadTiles);
 gameAssets.push(roadTiles);
 arrangeAssets();
 //

My arrangeAssets method just checks the array “no point posting as it fails most of the time.gennerally some items update but not all.
So im hoping some one has a solution to check X,Y value then setChildIndex of Array.
I have looked, keep getting reffered to 3rd party as3 engines which im not interested in as i want to make my own and have better understanding.

or is this not possible as im only using an X,Y grid

    arrangeAssets();{
var i:int = gameAssets.length;
while(i--){
    if (getChildIndex(sortedItems[i]) != i) {
        gameAssets.sortOn("y", Array.NUMERIC);
        setChildIndex(gameAssets[i], i);
    }
    }

I only add the items on top of the grass grid into the array.

Answer 1

assuming that the left most point is x: 0, y:0 the tiles are covering each other going from a high x and low y to a low x and high y values.

I would add a weight variable (call it what you like), and calculate it from (totalx - x) * y

this would have the top-most corner have a value of 0, and the bottom most have the highest value. every row (diagonal really) would be the same.

Then sort on the weight and you have a list of items in the relative z stack.

this doesn’t really address the setchildIndex, because you can’t have two items there. a hack would be to remove all and add them back in the order. (you could have a temp child, that you add as children to, that way you don’t have to remove the children as it is done automatically)

I found this image that shows the weight as _yfrom http://www.kirupa.com/developer/isometric/depth_sorting.htm

the _y is the same because (totalx - x) * y values horizontally are the same