What does the ordering of objects in the Outliner denote to?

Tools Maya
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I am trying to understand the “two ways” Maya views a scene. I understand most of it, accept for what the left to right (in the case of the Hypergraph), or top/down (in the case of the Outliner), order of the scenes nodes have to do with it.

For example, in the Outliner (with Display > Scene Order set to “Scene Hierarchy”) I can change the order of objects/Nodes by middle mouse dragging them, this change is also reflected in the Hypergraph window. So it does not seem to be arbitrary organisation.

I thought the Outliner is only being used to edit/visualise one of the “two ways” ways to view a scene, which is the Hierarchy but this does not seem to be the case.

I have read the latest documentation sections for the Outliner, Hypergraph and “Nodes and attributes” but cant figure out what the ordering of Nodes/Objects in the Outliner denotes to. Either they dont mention this in the documentation or I am overlooking it.

I guess what I am trying to determine is, if this top/down ordering is the Outliners way of editing/visualising the Dependency graph (inputs/outputs).

I am learning Maya for a TD career, so that is why I am trying to figure this out.

I am on Maya 2025.

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The order of the outliner is the order in which things are rendered

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I do not think the outliner displays rendering order

The Outliner shows a hierarchical list of all objects in the scene
It shows parents and children

with display / sort order / scene hierarchy
the order of parent root objects is the order in which they are created / added.
Here I created ZZZ_CUBE first, then AAA_Cube :
image

ZZZ_CUBE sorts on top because it was created first.
cameras sort above that because they were present to begin with.

with display / sort order / alphabetical within type
the order of parent root objects is alphabetical
image

You’ll notice the cameras and cubes get mixed up because their type is all transform

The outliner is not a DAG graph, it is a hierarchy graph. It does not show connections and relationships like the Node Editor or Hypergraph.

I am not sure the left to right order of Hypergraph is intended to convey any information.
It seems to be “creation order” like the outliner in scene hierarchy mode.

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This explains a lot. Brilliant, thank you mate!

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But at least in the bad old days there were engines – Crytek comes to mind – who treated outliner order as significant for other things.

Don’t do that; almost no maya users make a point of messing with outliner order.