Graph Algorithm

Since I did spend more than a day on thinking about this one, I guess it's worth posting. Here's how it works:

You have 5 "levels", essentially the depth of the deepest tree in the game. Each of these have a value that indicates how far from the top do you go down before drawing a node. We'll call it the height for the sake of clarity. If a call is made to increment a level x (x being 1 through 5), a call is made to all levels greater than x. This call checks the value of the called level and compares it to the value of level x. If theirs is smaller than level x, it is set to the value of level x. Level 1 starts at the way left and level 5 is at the far right.

The first thing that gets passed in to the main recursive function is the root node.

To start, the recursive function checks to see if the node is a leaf, i.e. doesn't have any child nodes. If it is, it calls a drawing method that returns the drawing. It then increments the height of the level by the standard height of the drawing. Finally, the drawing gets returned.

If the the parent node (not necessarily the root node) does have child nodes, they first get sorted by their depth. An empty array is also created. Then, a call is made to the main recursive function for each of the child nodes. The drawings that are returned are added to the array. When all the children have been cycled through the height of the level first gets set to that of its first child's level height plus halfway the distance between the first child node and the last one. This will caused the parent node to be drawn right in the middle of its child nodes, height-wise. A call is made to draw the parent node. The array of child node drawings are then cycled through and lines between them and the parent node are drawn. Finally, the drawing of the parent node gets returned.

This method requires no recursion to make "adjustments" for over-lapping. It's a one-shot passthrough. It can be somewhat optimized to run a bit more efficiently but as these graphs aren't terribly big, there wouldn't be any noticeable time savings. I hope my explanation is clear and if anyone wants me to clarify any of it, just post a comment.