Animations stop when out of camera?

I have a third-person game with some animated enemies. Whenever I turn the camera away from these enemies, wait for a second, then turn it back, they often appear stuck. I noticed this tends to happen when they are supposed to perform some action while the camera is looking away that changes the animation they are using.

For example, one enemy is attached to a large sphere. When i stand near this enemy and keep the camera on it, it will idle. I programmed the enemy to retreat into its sphere when my player character is > 20 blender units away, playing a “retreat” animation in order to do so. If I have the camera pointed at an idling enemy, turn the camera away, walk 20 units away, then look back, the enemy will appear frozen in place without having actually retreated. If I never look away from the enemy, it behaves normally.

I believe that armatures not within camera range somehow decide not to play their actions. Is there some way to disable this horrible “feature?”

I also noticed this on tenticle like trees I have animated. If I spin around and new tenticle come into view, they seem to glitch out which looks horrible and is immersion breaking.

agree with you

There is an animation culling to avoid to update some animations when animated objects are outside frustum because it costs performances. There are workarounds to avoid these kind of issues (increase the size of the visibility box (for example parent a big box to your armatured mesh and ensure this box will always be inside frustum)). I think animation culling can be kept but an option + python API per object to disable it could be added. This is not difficult to implement. There are other culling options which could be implemented to disable physics and/or logic per object in some conditions (upbge begun to do things like that, this is easy optimizations to do, and this allow user to optimize his game). We’ll see what will be done in 2.8.

This issue has come up numerous times before. Until an option is added to disable armature culling, you will have to use a workaround (see this thread for some options).

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also , if you happens to be using blender above 2.76 , thin you need to know that thy have tuns of bug,s on the armature, and its geting worse and worse every time , one of the feature that was there but not anymore was the blending mode, where you could blend to animations at the same time ,
if you tryd this now, one of them will override the other ,and the one with the lowest number of Chanel will