Actionscript 3: make certain objects in child A appear above child B while others appear under child B

Question

Imagine I have a background and I want to show the background under the player object. This can be done with ease:

var player:Player = new Player();
addChild(player);

var background:Background = new Background();
addChildAt(background, 0);

However, imagine in this background I have transparent clouds which have to appear above the ship and non-transparent stars which need to appear under the ship. The above code would simply make all background objects go under the ship. Any tips?

Answer 1

Make a foreground layer that is rendered after the Player object. That is the easiest way to accomplish this effect.

i.e.

var foreground:* = ...;
addChildAt(foreground, 2);

I'd imagine you're going to have multiple objects that you want to appear between the foreground and background layers, so I would actually also recommend creating an "active" layer, which is the actual parent of your "player" object.

So the object hierarchy looks akin to this:

Scene
    Background
        Rolling hills
    Active
        Player Sprite
        Enemies
        Obstacles
    Foreground
        Clouds