Hi everyone!

I picked up PICO-8 again after some months and discovered some very strange thing: The mouse click needs to be very "hard" to be recognised by the editor. I swift and fast one is ignored. When using the macbook track pad it‘s the same. I have set it to "tap to click", that does never work at all (although it works in all other applications).

It feels like the mouse button needs to be down for a small fraction of a second, just a click is not enough. Is the handling of mouse input in PICO-8 handled differently than in the standard OS way? Is there some kind of lag anywhere?

This does not make the editor completely useless, but it's annoying and frustrating. I use macOS Catalina.

Any ideas?

It depends on how you code it. Here, try this:

function _init()
  x=64
  poke(24365,1)
end

function _draw()
  cls()
  circfill(x,64,7)
end

function _update()
  if stat(34)==1 then
    x+=1
  elseif stat(34)==2 then
    x-=1
  end
end

You shouldn't have to push down very hard. Just tap the mouse and the player will move. Tap the right button to go to the left.

That's all. Let me know if you're still having problems.

Thanks a lot, dw817!

Unfortunately that does not help at all, because I was talking about mouse clicks in the editors, not at run-time. Sorry if that was not clear.

I didn't even think about using the mouse in the running games. What I meant was the mouse clicking in the sprite, code, sound editors …

Any thoughts about this?

If it's in the editor and not during runtime, hmm ... might be a hardware problem. Do you get bad clicks in other software ? What Operating System are you using ?

Windows
Linux
Macintosh
... ?

I use macOS Catalina, MacBook Pro. And no, nothing like this in any other software...

I guess it’s something very deep down in the PICO-8 Input manager. @zep?

Same problem here. I am using macOS High Sierra on MacBook Pro (2011), and PICO-8 does not register "tap to click" clicks in the editor. I have to push the touchpad hard to click on something in the editor. I have to hook up a mouse if I want to start editing anything before the editor drives me insane.

Is there any solution/options for setting the click sensitivity in PICO-8, if that is a thing?

That’s great to hear that I am not the only one!

Same here. I have Tap to click turned on and it works 50% of the time which makes Pico-8 development quite annoying. Only solutions I know of is a full press on the trackpad (annoying) for a click or an external mouse (not always possible). I suspect it's a Mac trackpad mouse-up event that's not always fired and SDL based apps like Pico-8 rely on that event. Same issue on TIC-80. Would be wonderful to have this fixed.

Well guys I guess you can contact @zep in Twitter about this problem. That's where he's at most of the time.

I try to avoid the mouse as much as I can when I'm coding in Pico-8. I know it's required for drawing sprites but I often use my own keyboard tool for that.

One more question about the "hard click." Do you need to click down with physical force or is it you just need to hold the button down longer for Pico-8 to acknowledge it ?

A hard click always registers as a click for me - but this defeats the point of the Tap-to-click feature on a MacBook. Duration of holding down a trackpad click with physical force is irrelevant for me as a hard click always registers. Yeah I may ping zep but feels like this is only affecting a very small number of users. My primary workaround is to use Aseprite (+import) for all art. Still looking at options for sfx/music.