How to deal with jittery diagonal movement?

Published 2023-06-12


So here is a question I have. There is this common issue in Pico-8 that comes up when you move things on the screen diagonally. If the vertical/horizontal speed is not an integer number the moving object will exhibit a jagged, jittery motion. This is due to the fact that Pico-8 doesn't do sub-pixel rendering. So the coordinates of objects snap to integer positions. In certain cases this leads to a kind of "stair-step" trajectory that can look very jittery.

My question: is there a good workaround to deal with this phenomenon? It is not always possible to use integer values for movement speeds after all.