Actually it doesn't, because that would require updating the state of the parent's children every time a change in the parent is made, which would add another bit of code to every transformation function, and add this transformation matrix that gets stored with the sprite and make the whole of the code that much more confusing.
That and:
1. It's not often that you have a parent object that just sits there and doesn't animate, so most of the time you have to update your transformation stuff anyway, so this would add more calculation.
2. You can't use a transformation matrix to transform an object into "path" space, so you'd have two different ways of transforming stuff to keep track of making things more complex.
3. I haven't run into any instance where it's not plenty fast enough to just step through the heiarchy tree to calculate a sprite's current position/rotation/scale/alpha/color/fog/etc each frame. You don't generally have a child with more than two parents.
4. Speaking of which those other properties would also not be covered by the standard transformation matrix.
And none of that means you can't request a local or global position in my system, because you certainly can do that, and there's no recursion or anything for getting a local position obviously.
That and:
1. It's not often that you have a parent object that just sits there and doesn't animate, so most of the time you have to update your transformation stuff anyway, so this would add more calculation.
2. You can't use a transformation matrix to transform an object into "path" space, so you'd have two different ways of transforming stuff to keep track of making things more complex.
3. I haven't run into any instance where it's not plenty fast enough to just step through the heiarchy tree to calculate a sprite's current position/rotation/scale/alpha/color/fog/etc each frame. You don't generally have a child with more than two parents.
4. Speaking of which those other properties would also not be covered by the standard transformation matrix.
And none of that means you can't request a local or global position in my system, because you certainly can do that, and there's no recursion or anything for getting a local position obviously.