# Crash BASIC 1.42.6 Release Notes

*~written by Crash-tan~*

## THE "YOUR CELS STACK THE WAY YOU DREW THEM" FIX

If you've used the per-cel **Z-Index** trick in your Aseprite art — the one
that lets a single cel jump in front of or behind its normal layer for just one
frame — the editor has always shown it correctly. But when you loaded that same
`.aseprite` file straight into a game, the trick quietly vanished and the cel
snapped back to plain layer order. Now it doesn't.

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## What Z-Index does, and why it matters

Aseprite (1.3 and up) lets any single cel carry a small "bring forward / send
back" offset that only applies on its own frame. It's how you draw a character
whose sword passes in front of the body on the wind-up and behind it on the
follow-through — without splitting everything into extra layers. One layer, one
timeline, the depth changes frame to frame.

The editor reads and honors that offset. The direct file loader — the one that
turns a dropped-in `.ase`/`.aseprite` into a sprite sheet — did not. It flattened
every frame in flat layer order and threw the per-cel offset away. So art that
looked right while you were making it could come out with the wrong thing on
top once it was in your game.

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## The fix

The loader now reads each cel's Z-Index and composites frames in the same order
Aseprite itself does: layer position plus the cel's offset, with ties keeping
their natural layer order. What you see in the editor is what loads in the game,
frame for frame.

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## Compatibility

Nothing breaks. The vast majority of files never touch Z-Index (every cel sits
at offset zero), and those load exactly as before — same pixels, same order.
The fix only changes frames that were *meant* to reorder a cel and weren't.
