awkward workflow for simultaneous editing (both pico8 and Tiled)

[pancelor]

This happens to me often enough:

1. I open a p8 cart in pico8
2. I open the same cart in Tiled
3. I edit some non-map data in pico8 (sprites, music, etc)
4. I edit the map in Tiled, and save it
5. My edits from 3 were overwritten!

This can be avoided by adding extra steps after 3: 3.1. ctrl-S in pico8 to save the cart 3.2. ctrl-R in Tiled to load the cart

But it's a bit awkward. Would it be possible when saving from Tiled to re-read the pico8 cart and only edit the map? That would eliminate the need for step 3.2.

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Having written this up, I've realized that step 3.1 will still be necessary, so this probably isn't actually a very helpful suggested solution. Maybe what I want instead is to be able to save the map to a custom .txt format that I can #include and then parse during game startup...

[pancelor]

Alright, I got it working! The workflow is much nicer for me -- no accidental overwriting or pico8 saying "didn't save; conflicting external changes" anymore. But it's pretty janky; the user has to create a .p8l file beforehand with the exact right info in it, and Tiled only knows how to load the sprites by reading an absolute path from a comment in the custom .p8l file... it's a bit of a mess. I think I'll make a separate repo for this

[samhocevar]

Yeah, unfortunately the workflow you aim for can’t really happen without some additional help from PICO-8. Maybe Zep would agree to implement some kind of interval-based autosave feature?

If you are running Windows, another, maybe less intrusive solution, could be a AutoHotKey script that detects whenever PICO-8 is about to lose focus, or Tiled gains focus, and sends PICO-8 a Ctrl-S keystroke. Not sure if this accounts for all situations, but it’s probably the approach I’d try.