What's the best practice to control HUD's depth?

[alexlange]

Hi, I have a prefab like below and there're about 10 HUD in my scene.
HUD
   |--BoxFrame(sprite)
   |--Sprite
   |--Label

I want to control their depth, make every HUD overlap correctly.
My work around is set every sprites depth as queue in script, it works but seems not a good practice.
What's the best practice?
First comes to my mind is UIPanel for each HUD. It works good but extra draw-call is heavy.
Then I noticed the old-style HUD.transform.z, and it seems not working anymore.
I also tried put a UIWidget on HUD hoping depth can work like UIPanel, no luck.

Any idea?
Thank you!

[LightSky]

I don't see a problem with just setting their depth when you create it.  That seems like the most efficient way of going about it,  I have had much success doing it this way for my mobile games.    Creating a new UIPanel for each is a big no no since the draw calls will start to add up quickly depending on how many popups are going on, it would destroy FPS on mobiles.

Everytime you make a new popup just set it like:    (Reference to the HUDText Sprite/Text).depth = DrawCallQueue();

You could just toss this in a static class for global reference.

1. int mDrawCall = 0; //Start  Depth Value
2.  
3. public int DrawCallQueue
4. {
5.    get
6.    {
7.        mDrawcall++;
8.        return mDrawCall;
9.    }
10. }
11.  

[alexlange]

I don't see a problem with just setting their depth when you create it.  That seems like the most efficient way of going about it,  I have had much success doing it this way for my mobile games.    Creating a new UIPanel for each is a big no no since the draw calls will start to add up quickly depending on how many popups are going on, it would destroy FPS on mobiles.

Everytime you make a new popup just set it like:    (Reference to the HUDText Sprite/Text).depth = DrawCallQueue();

You could just toss this in a static class for global reference.

1. int mDrawCall = 0; //Start  Depth Value
2.  
3. public int DrawCallQueue
4. {
5.    get
6.    {
7.        mDrawcall++;
8.        return mDrawCall;
9.    }
10. }
11.  

Yes, that's exactly what I did, just wondering if there's some container can do it directly.
Thank you