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I did set out to make a wireframe two-point perspective dungeon crawl in PICO-8 once. It worked(I recall the math for making the height of walls feel correct at different distances was hard to understand and I probably did resort to the CG approach) but I eventually abandoned it because I was spending way too much time trying to deal with occlusion and optimize it for PICO-8's CPU.

Since then the system constraints have changed and I would probably just make a tline() raycaster.



PICO-8 is such a fun piece of software. Getting lost in graphics optimization for it feels like it's more the norm than the exception =D


Getting lost in optimization is the opposite of actually making things, and as an artist, it's at the top of my reasons why PICO-8 isn't fun to use.


That's a fair point. PICO-8 never appealed to me for artistic expression, it's purely a programming challenge to cram as much functionality as possible into a tiny, tiny program.


My experiences with PICO-8 led me in the direction of making my own fantasy console...which then turned into a more thorough examination of computing itself.

I reached the conclusion that what I want is actually a lot of small source mediums that would cooperate well together and be bundled in arbitrary fashion as a single runtime engine, vs the "familiar computer platform but less" model that is intrinsic to the PICO-8 approach, which puts a lot of pressure on the platform to address all needs.

So I started working on that problem instead. What I have now is a binary format that might suffice as a common source document type. It's binary because it let me declare more precise meanings for the bits instead of offloading those meanings to a character parser, but it's also text-like because it doesn't enforce a lot of structure, it has notions of "lines" and "strings".

I'm now just about to where I can test it on media I might want to write and work in and see how well it edits.




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