Sprite draw-order in libgdx

From other frameworks I know methods for easy ordering sprites within a spritebatch (to determine if a sprite has to be drawn in front or behind another sprite). For example in MonoGame/XNA this is called Sprite.depth or Pyglet has its OrderedGroups.

But I cannot find anything like that in libgdx. I've read that libgdx' scene2d has something like that but I don't want to use that as I use a entity system (ashley) and want to keep rendering separeted from the other logic.

What is the appropriate way to set the draw-order of libgdx sprites?

Answer

You are correct that libGDX doesn't contain any sort of built-in support for rendering sprites in a certain order. (If it's there, I haven't seen it, and I've been using libGDX for a number of years.)

What I do is create a SpriteComponent class that wraps the Texture object and emits x, y, and z attributes.

Then in my draw method, I sort all SpriteComponents by z (ascendingly) and draw them -- so lower-Z items draw first, then higher-Z items on top.