is there a plan to add built in pico8 multiplayer using synced inputs?
basically it would be handled in pico8 rather than the cart.
it would allow players to connect to each other via ip or game uid and official lexaloffle connecting servers through the pause menu.
this might be the easiest way to build a multiplayer game since there would be no packets being sent besides the hard coded inputs.
networked inputs would be accessible the same way normal inputs are with btn(btn, player).
this would also make multiplayer games have not just networked players but local ones as well.
players count would be limited to the number of inputs pico8 has.




Hey folks!
Today I'm releasing a cool little lib for adding analytics to your PICO-8 game.
You might ask, "wat?" So lemme demonstrate with a quick video:
Essentially, it's a way to track what your players are doing, and to analyze that data afterward for insights. Are players discovering the secret power-up in my game? Are they dying too much, and quitting out of frustration? You can track all of that! And use that information to make your game's design better.
This library sends data to Segment, where I work as a full-time engineer. (I do PICO-8 development as a hobby.) Segment is a badass analytics product that forwards your data to hundreds of tools. For starters, you can turn on Google Analytics in Segment, but there are many other tools in the catalog you can check out.
To use it, head on over to the GitHub repo for instructions (https://github.com/segmentio/analytics-pico8). Using it looks something like this:


Just like the lady says, this program is ready to smash some bytes !!
Or to be more technical, DWORDS, where a single numeric value is saved in 4-bytes.
from the lab of dw817 comes a
new way of storing sram instead
of just with dget() and dset().
not all data that is recorded
needs to take 4-bytes per
variable leaving you only room
to store 64-numbers.
introducing "sram smasher."
a set of useful routines that
will squeeze your data into a
series of micro bits instead of
single fat 4-byte values.
safeguard ensures sram not
written to unless completely
without user errors.
(Demo values to test the functions is included)
I'm working on a utility to help other programmers at the moment (including myself). I am using the compressor my "Image Compressor" uses for raw data but think I can do better.
Didn't someone make a compression program in PICO earlier that used the same fundamentals as PKZIP ?
And if so, does anyone remember where it went ?




A simulation of the Galton board. Press Z to reset.
At each step, each bean will randomly move left or right. The distribution of the beans when they reach the floor is given by the binomial distribution, which is an approximation of the normal distribution for large values of n (central limit theorem).

UPDATE 2: I went in and added parallax scrolling! I'm very pleased with how it turned out. This will probably be the final update to the game, as I've now completed everything I was interested in doing.
UPDATE: Based on feedback, I've added the option to add a border or background around the minimap. The option can be seen in the pause menu (press []). I also added a sash that shows what level you're about to begin.
My first real Pico-8 game! It's a clone of the classic arcade game Bosconian, which has always been a favorite of mine. I'm really happy with how it turned out. There's a few things that I might eventually revisit, and the music is sort of terrible, but all and all not bad for my first fully fledged game.
X to shoot,






I am definitely seeing a way to store more than 256-bytes at a time.
cartdata("mister_1") for i=0,63 do dset(0,i) end cartdata("mister_2") for i=0,63 do dset(0,i) end |
And then I'm greeted with this message:
CARTDATA() CAN ONLY BE CALLED ONCE |
Really ... really ? I mean if you could have multiple Cartdata() commands you could save, well, gee, I don't know, 8192 bytes perhaps ??
Good grief. There's one things in setting limitations in a programming language for nostalgic purposes and then there's just outright imprisoning your data ... 😨

