I'm currently using LibGDX and Tiled map editor to render isometric maps. I'm having a two related difficulties.
The first issue is, when do I render units that will end up changing position often and to which layer? At first I thought that I would render units with a wall layer so that walls behind of and in front of the unit are drawn correctly. However, the problem with this is that if a unit (i.e. a character) steps in front of say an object in some sort of top-level decoration layer, part of that object will be drawn on top of the unit.
The second issue is how to deal with layers that have static objects that units will often be stepping in front of or behind. Let's say you have a decoration layer where you will place trees. The problem with this layer is that depending on where some objects are placed in the layer, they will overlap inconsistently. For example, the following:
I know this is related to painter's algorithm, but I'm using LibGDX's tile map renderer so the extent to which I have control over drawing the map is rendering different layers at a time and switching out cells/tiles in a layer.