Is the order of SKNode.nodesAtPoint guaranteed?

Question

SKNode has a method nodesAtPoint which returns an array of children nodes that intersect given point. Is the order of the elements in such array deterministic (e.g. by drawing order)?

I could not find an answer in documentation, so probably the answer is "no", but I would like to verify.

I would assume they're ordered by z position, but if it isn't documented I wouldn't do anything that relies on a specific order. — dan, Jul 05 '15 at 15:13
It's fairly straightforward to sort the array in `zPosition` order — 0x141E, Jul 06 '15 at 18:57

Epic Byte · Accepted Answer · 2015-07-06T03:51:36.567

1

Nope, Sprite Kit does not take into account z-position when traversing the node-tree (definitely for performance reasons). You can easily see this by adding a few nodes to a scene in-order and then changing the z-positions. The order will always be based on the position of the node within the node-tree, rather than the z-position.

edited Jul 06 '15 at 03:51

answered Jul 06 '15 at 03:45

Epic Byte

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Thanks. I did some better tests myself, and it seems that the order is not always there at all. – 0x416e746f6e Jul 06 '15 at 18:14
@AntonBronnikov Yup, and if you have nodes with children it gets even more unpredictable. – Epic Byte Jul 06 '15 at 18:15
Which means that there's some hash-table probably being used under the water, some dictionary I guess. At any rate, I think have to do sorting on the result array. – 0x416e746f6e Jul 06 '15 at 18:18

Is the order of SKNode.nodesAtPoint guaranteed?

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