What are the situations that you have come across where only manual depth
management would work? Do you have other ways of managing depth?
It's not a matter of getNextHighestDepth not working, it's a matter of
controlling the depth to avoid unexpected behaviors. I've never had a
problem with accidentally creating a movie clip at the same depth as
something else, and that's one less thing I have to think about when
debugging.
The only time when setting depth constants was inconvenient for me was
in a windowing system I built, in which case I built a window manager class
that managed depth for me. The window manager class kept windows on a
timeline where nothing but windows would ever be created, and always kept
the depths of the windows consecutive, so when a window was closed it was
swapped to the top before closing, and there were never gaps in the depths.
I *could* have used getNextHighestDepth and saved myself the trouble of
swapping windows to the top before closing them, but then if a user left the
app open overnight and used it for several days in a row, they could
theoretically open enough windows to hit the 65,535 depth limit and
unexpected things could happen. So I went ahead and wrote the extra 10 lines
of code to keep the depths consecutive, and circumvented the problem before
it ever occurred.
ryanm
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