Anchor to Parent

[ghost]

Not sure if this is by design, but parent's pivot does not seem to have an effect on children's placement.

For example:

• Parent has pivot (0,1) (top-left) and coordinate (0, SY), where SY is the height of the viewport. IgnoreViewport = true. As expected, the object's image is rendered at the top-left corner of the screen.
• Child object has pivot (0,1) and coordinates (2,-2). I thought it be drawn at (2, SY-2) on screen, but instead it gets drawn at (2, SY - PH - 2), where PH is parent's height. As if its coordinates were offset from parent's bottom-left.

Setting child's coordinates to (2, -2 + PH) positions it where wanted (at parent, with 2,-2 offset).

[tzachshabtay]

So I thought about it a little bit, and I'm not sure what the correct behavior here should be.

As a counter example, take a look at the inventory panel in the demo game: I'm placing it at the center of the screen with the pivot as (0.5, 0.5) as an easy way to have it centered. But for the button panel on the left, it still makes sense to place it at x = 5 and not x = 5 - PW/2.

Also, if I want to rotate said panel, one time around the center, and one time around the top-left point, it makes sense to only change its pivot and position without needing to also change the positions of all of the children.

For what you want, I think maybe we need an additional feature for specifying anchoring.

As a side note, to make the behavior you want, all it takes is to pass null instead of the parent's pivot in the matrix component (https://github.com/tzachshabtay/MonoAGS/blob/2f85d1847ae8e8cab83b53229f6dd8bc347e0cc2/Source/Engine/AGS.Engine/Objects/AGSModelMatrixComponent.cs#L338), so from the perspective of the code, it will actually change it to "ignore" the parent's pivot, i.e the opposite of the title.

[ghost]

For what you want, I think maybe we need an additional feature for specifying anchoring.

Yes, I guess that's what is missing. Since pivot is like a private property that defines the image positioning.