object priorities

[city41]

Going to dump object priority findings here.

Initially, it looks like it is "last object wins". So if two objects want to render into the same cell of the background grid, the last one to render will clobber the previous ones.

example

here the underwater floor came first in the level, followed by the donut. So donut clobbered the floor in its cell.

and this the same level except donut came first, then floor. So in this case, floor clobbered donut.

It seems most object interactions work this way, but not all.

[city41]

This plateau is of the type "eagerly render down as far as possible"

Here the plateau came first in the level, then the block. So again, later clobbers earlier

now flipped, block came first. In this case, the plateau encountered the block and stopped rendering. However, this only occurs on the plateaus x column. In other words, if the block was moved right by one tile, the plateau would clobber the block:

[city41]

In Smaghetti, when the user creates a level like this

they don't get what they expect

this is because Smaghetti placed the lower plateau first in the level, which caused the higher plateau to detect its presence and stop its downward rendering. Smaghetti will almost certainly need a manual object priority override here to allow the user to get what they want, and smaghetti needs to render the entities to show them accurately what they will get.