Understanding active actors

Stencyl does its best to assist us in optimizing our games. For example, if we have a moving actor in our scene, but it leaves our screen, Stencyl will make the actor inactive, so that it isn't wasting our computer's processing resources on unnecessary physics calculations. The actor will be made active again when it reappears in our scene.

Although this optimization feature is very useful, it can cause problems with certain forms of gameplay. For example, we may want our offscreen actors to remain active, even though they have left the screen. In our game, we may occasionally see that this built-in optimization becomes a problem if a statue falls at an angle, or on its side, at the very edge of the screen. The statue can freeze in midair.

In the following screenshot, the dotted rectangle represents the screen that we can see during gameplay. The statue is falling such that it is far enough away from the edge of the screen to make the actor inactive, but close enough...