Writing a better 2D engine. (Phoenix 2D Game Engine)

[Andreaz]

Well the z-buffering should work by default (unless it's disabled somewhere else) try calling

glEnable  (GL_DEAPTH_TEST);

before rendering the sprites and test if it helps. One thing to note thought, the blending might cause problems if you enable deapth testing, a sprite that is rendered before another sprite cant blend with the following one (this is a limitation of OpenGL and DirectX and has nothing to do with Phoenix). If you only has one color transparency you can avoid this by calling

glAphaFunct(GL_GREATER, 0.1);
glEnable(GL_ALPHA_TEST);

and this will skip all transparent pixels further up in the opengl pipeline.

The reason behind the sprite layers (wich was a new adition to the 1.0 release, the betas had one texture per sprite) is simply a speed matter, you can render 10x times the sprites by batching sprites into a larger spriteset instead of needing to rebind the texture for each sprite.

And for a hint on how to render one image per sprite:

//------------------------------------------------------------------------------
procedure TMyAnimatedSprite.Render;
var Image: TPHXImage; // Move to private decleration
begin
  Image:= ImageList.Find('MyImage'); // move to constructor

  glPushAtrib(GL_TEXTURE_BIT); // Save the binded texture
  Image.Bind;

  glPushMatrix();
    glTranslatef(WorldPosition.X, WorldPosition.Y, WorldPosition.Z);

    glCallList(Image.DisplayList + PatternIndex + 1);
  glPopMatrix();
 
  glPopAttrib();
end;