How do I prevent dynamic GUI elements from overlapping in Unity?

Question

I'm working on a birds-eye-view for our Unity3D game world, where each point of interest has a label hovering above it. The problem is that sometimes they overlap, although there is more than enough space on the screen for them to co-exist.

Can anybody think of a better way to separate them than checking every texture with every other texture and moving them away from each other?

Answer 1

I managed to do it this way:

• Put all gui elements in a list.
• sort them from bottom to top on their Y coordinate
• loop through them in this order, if one collides with a previous one, move it up as much as necessary and go to the next.

this way you'll get a neat stack of GUI-labels (names of game objects in my case) and they'll never overlap.