My last problem has barely been solved and I have already encountered the next one.

I am making a simple 3D first-person game. I made trees by rendering 2D sprites in my 3D world wich are always turned toward the player.

The tree sprites have some transparent pixels in them. When a few of them overlap, sometimes, a part of the fruthest tree is not rendered behind the transparent pixels of the one in front of it. It's hard to explain so here is a screenshot:

Anyway, I did some googling around and found out that the best solution would be to make sure everything is rendered from back to front.

Everything visible in my game is an entity and I just loop through them all every frame to render them, but now I'm going to have to make sure they are all rendered from far away from the player -> close to the player. That order could theoretically change every frame.

I wonder what would be an efficient way to make sure all entities are rendered ordered by their distance to the player? The height coordinate (Y-axis) does not matter in this case, because this is 0 for every entity.

Many thanks in advance,

Freek

You could introduce a z-order component to each of your items. Then sort your list of items by z-order and draw them in order.

I just did something like this. I just sorted all entities by the distance to the player, but when I turn the camera slightly, sometimes the transparent pixels still overlap.

By the way: The sprites only have fully transparent and fully visible pixels, so nothing in between.

I just found out I could just do this:

glAlphaFunc(GL_GREATER, 0.1f);
glEnable(GL_ALPHA_TEST);

This does exactly what I wanted.

Even with sorting in the renderer, doing sorting for say alpha blending has a lot of difficult edge cases, especially if 2 things you want to alpha blend are allowed to intersect, since then there is no correct order unless you split the objects along the intersection. e.g had this playing around with some simple water and small piece of floating semi transparent ice, both using alpha. You need to draw the ice block below the water line first, then the water, then the part of the ice block above the water line. Didn't really solve it, although in that case make the ice not transparent at all was not a major loss.