nuclide/Documentation/Materials/commands/sort.md

Materials: Commands

sort

Syntax

sort

Overview

Use this keyword to fine-tune the depth sorting of materials as they are compared against other materials in the game world. The basic concept is that if there is a question or a problem with materials drawing in the wrong order against each other, this allows the designer to create a hierarchy of which materials draws in what order.

The default behavior is to put all blended materials in sort "additive" and all other materials in sort "opaque", so you only need to specify this when you are trying to work around a sorting problem with multiple transparent surfaces in a scene.

Values

The value here can be either a numerical value or one of the keywords in the following list (listed in order of mostly ascending priority):

• ripple: Meant for surfaces blending below water surfaces I guess.
• eferredlight: Blend at the same order as deferred lighting. So before diffuse mapping usually takes place.
• portal: This surface is a portal, it draws over every other shader seen inside the portal, but before anything in the main view.
• sky: Typically, the sky is the farthest surface in the game world. Drawing this after other opaque surfaces can be an optimization on some cards. This currently has the wrong value for this purpose, so it doesn't do much of anything.
• opaque: This surface is opaque (rarely needed since this is the default with noblendfunc)
• decal: Blend it like a decal. Ones affected by light, or something.
• seethrough: Not sure what to call this, beyond repeating its name and it being between decal and unlitdecal.
• unlitdecal: Blend it like an unlit decal, this most commonly is bullet impacts.
• banner: Transparent, but very close to walls.
• underwater: Draw behind normal transparent surfaces.
• blend: Draw like a blendFunc blend transparent surface.
• additive: normal transparent surface (default for shaders with blendfuncs)
• nearest: this shader should always sort closest to the viewer, e.g. muzzle flashes and blend blobs

It is generally recommended you stick to the keywords. The engine may introduce new ones and you will benefit from internal sorting parameters not clashing with yours whenever the engine may update them.