Lightweight (Physics-Free) Actors

Lightweight Actors relieve performance issues on games with many actors that have low or non-existent physics requirements by disabling physics specifically for these actors. It will arrive in StencylWorks 1.2.

Read about Lightweight Actors on our Blog

Feel free to discuss this feature here.

Yay, I can't wait to see this working! I think that it having it switched for particular actors is the best way to do that. Just to make using this feature even easier to use, I'd suggest adding "Default Lightweight Actors" (in SW preferences or Game Settings; the latter seems better because some game are more physics-oriented, some aren't) or something like that; this way if someone makes a game based entirely on lightweight actors doesn't have to remember about switching it every type when new actor type is created.

By the way, I read in the blog post that there with 200 actors lightweight option was 60 FPS fast, and I wonder how many actors it would take to bring it below this value. Not that I would need more of them, just interested. ^^'

I also am excited about this. It's something I've requested before myself, so definitely a bonus for me.

About the FPS you mention Sunflower - a lot will still depend on the computer as well as how many non-lightweight actors there are. And once you create a bullet-hell schmup, 200 actors is not very many

Nice, Jon. Besides bounding box collision, could you also add pixel-perfect one?

Those would go great with my GUI actors, which require no physics at all.

It seems like at least some basic bounding box collision will be necessary for this to be useful to most people.

This sounds great, so we get the lightweight acttors in the next update but will they come with the basic collision or is that later on?

I'll make sure all my decorative water drops are lightweight actors.

Collisions will arrive after the first update in which they appear. The iOS support for lightweight actors is stable right now and has been deployed to those testers.

Flash support is working but still not stable enough for public consumption. There a surprising number of ways it can go wrong, so we want to make sure it's rock solid before building anything on top of it.