Object changing layer when going between frames?

Question

I have a child of an object that stays on the scene when the frame changes. So I gotoAndStop(2); and the object is still there. However, when I come back to frame one. The object is on the lowest layer, despite the fact that I originally added it using addChildAt(character, 1); I think this adds it to the first layer? Anyone know how I can fix this issue of keeping a movieclip object on the top layer despite changing frames? Thanks.

Answer 1

In AS3/Flash, the bottom most layer is 0. So doing addChildAt(character, 1) would make your character the second to the bottom layer. addChildAt(character, 0) would make it the very bottom/back layer.

If you want to make it the top most layer, you do any one of the following:

addChild(character); //this is the shortest amount of code

addChildAt(character, numChildren-1); //the is exactly the same as above

setChildIndex(character, numChildren-1); //this is also the same but requires the character already be present on the display list

The latter (setChildIndex) may be preferred IF your character originates on the timeline (eg not created through code). The reason being, if you change through code the parentage of something created on the timeline, it will not go away when no longer present on the timeline.

If you want a way to force something to always be on top, you can do something along these lines:

this.addEventListener(Event.ADDED, bringToTop);

function bringToTop(e:Event):void {
    setChildIndex(character, numChildren-1);
}

Doing that, makes it so whenever any other object is added as a child of this, it will set the character to the very top most layer/z-index.