Breaking through barriers and buffers

I just noticed I've been writing in English recently even when the first entries are in Finnish. My thoughts just flow more naturally this way. Funny. Anyways, sorting all objects in the scene so that things further away are rendered first solved the issue with rendering. Then I realized that the problem is actually caused by the fps counter that is rendered on top of the final scene; rendering that string apparently likes to screw around with render states and turns off the z-buffer even when I do turn it on in the beginning of the game. This can be solved by simply enabling z-buffer in the beginning of each frame instead of just once in the beginning of the game. Now we are also rendering the arena the characters are standing on as a simple flat plane along with a skybox. Currently I'm trying to make the camera to be able to rotate around the player character around it's horizontal axis too, at the moment the camera can only be rotated around the y-axis.