So lets run that again one more time because understand this and its all plain sailing...

Here is a table, a plate, a bowl, a spoon, and some liquid for the bowl. These are images and lets say you have the icons for them that make them all the correct real world size. You put them all down on some surface in this case a white wonderland...


If you drag these icons over one another then they stack up in size order. You don't get to control the Z order. Small things always go on top of larger objects. Theres a good reason for that which I will show later. You can see also that these images include the transparent background which were all familiar on these forums. The icon size includes the transparent bit so if you really must then you can add more transparent edge to an icon to push it down but that doesn't happen all that often.

Ok so now we have white backdrop with 5 child icons on it whether in a line or stacked up.

If we change the situation so that we make the spoon a child of the plate and the liquid a child of the bowl and call these two new icons Plate_with_Spoon and Bowl_of_Liquid then we can make these two children of the table. Then the white backdrop can have one child of table like this.


Now if we edit the table icon and move, scale and rotate its Plate_with_Spoon then note that the spoon rotates with the plate, scales with it and moves with it. The spoon is now as though its part of the plate even though its a child of it. In other words the whole hierarchy under the edited icon takes on all the changes to it.

So we can pick up that Forest and move it and all the Woods and Copses move with it, scale with it and rotate with it.

And now you can see that if we make a general village with some huts in it all laid out nicely, then we can use that village in several maps with different rotations and scales and yet at the same time on each of them we could still go in and edit that village and move the individual huts about.

So grouping icons logically in a sensible hierarchy is vital. Putting a hut on a continent is not sensible. You need a set of layers that go from world down to battle map so that at some point there is a region, a village and then you put your hut on that. ViewingDale has various features to make that easy though you can ignore it all and make something unmanageable.