[10.4] Is it better to use the visible property or move sprites offstage?

In earlier versions of Director the visible (or visibility) sprite property was somewhat flakey and the general opinion was that it was best avoided. These days it works pretty reliably, and it seems more a matter of preference than anything else.

You should remember, though, that visibility, like puppetness, is a persistent property -- if you set the visible property of a particular sprite to false, it is the same as disabling the channel in the score. All further activity in that channel will be invisible until the visible property is set back to true, even if you jump to some other part of the movie.

Visibility overrides other sprite activity, so it can be useful for hiding a sprite while continuing to manipulate its other properties. Note also that a sprite's visibility can be set without the sprite needing to be a puppet, so the visible property may be used when dealing with sprites that are being controlled by the score rather than in Lingo.