DirectDrawing

DirectDrawing is Gondwana’s system for drawables that are not just tiles in a layer grid.

This includes things like:

• images
• rectangles
• text
• particles
• overlays attached to a view
• world-space decorative or debug elements

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Two important modes

A direct drawing can be associated with:

• a SceneLayer — world-space drawing
• a View — screen-space overlay drawing

That distinction is extremely useful.

Layer-bound direct drawings behave like scene content. View-bound direct drawings behave like HUD or overlay content.

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DirectDrawingManager

All direct drawings are centrally managed by DirectDrawingManager, which:

• auto-registers drawings
• updates them each frame
• filters them by layer or view
• sorts them deterministically by ZOrder and name

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Why it exists

Not everything in a game world is best represented as a tile or sprite. DirectDrawing is the escape hatch that is still engine-native.

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Mental model

If sprites are “engine-managed world actors,” direct drawings are “engine-managed custom visuals.”

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Where to read next

• Gondwana/Drawing/Direct/DirectDrawingManager.cs
• Gondwana/Drawing/Direct/*