Hullo-hullo! We have a bag of goodies for you today! 🥕🍬 As we hide away in our coding cave, a sound of intense keyboard tapping echoes in the background, whispering faint secrets of our stair tool prototypes. And while that will take some time to emerge, we've also accumulated a variety of smaller improvements, and figured we could package them up into their own update :3
👉️ Please see the bottom of this post for info about testing this patch preview.
2x terrain height
You can simply extend terrain higher now, making builds more epic, and ensuring that every day is leg day for the imaginary inhabitants.
Movable terrain chunks
You can now right-click on terrain chunks, revealing the ability to move them. This mode also shows all the other available controls, like changing height and falloff.
Rotatable towers
Circular buildings shall no longer look upon rectangular ones with jealousy. If you right-click a round building, you'll now see a curved arrow that lets you adjust rotation. Now you can get those support pillars juuust right.
Lower minimum height for buildings with roofs
We wouldn't want to break any laws of physics, so now that we've allowed higher elevation of terrain, we figured that to compensate, we could also allow buildings to go lower.
For buildings with roofs, we'd previously restricted their minimum height such that you could still have wooden gates in them, but we figured that's not a necessary restriction. You can now make them very short, almost tent-like.
Tiny Glade Super Resolution (TGSR)
We've been hearing here and there that Tiny Glade can turn graphics cards into leaf blowers 🍃 The main reason is that we'd render the image at full resolution, whereas most graphically-intensive games these days use upscaling via DLSS, FSR or XeSS. Those let games render at a reduced resolution (which is cheaper), and then synthesize full-res images by correlating information across frames.
We've now added TGSR - our own technique sporting competitive image quality and performance. It is now enabled by default, replacing our temporal anti-aliasing (TAA, which is still available). Compared to TAA, "TGSR Quality" can result in ~50% less GPU power use overall, while maintaining good image quality. You'll find options in a new menu under Settings → Video → Image.
(Why not integrate DLSS, FSR or XeSS? We still might, and we've internally tested the former two. DLSS has funny licensing requirements though, the public XeSS 1.x doesn't support Vulkan yet, and we'd have to ensure our integration of all of those matches the expectations of their vendors)
Other
* 🚭 Toggleable chimney smoke
* ⚙✍ Settings: add an option to hide the glade border (it will still appear when you're trying to build outside of it)
* ✏️ Glade border is now a dashed line instead of a solid one
* 🎶 Music system has been completely reworked, which should fix stuttering on game startup, rare hiccups and properly randomize the tracks when starting a new glade.
* 🐛 Fix trees placed on water sinking underwater when grabbed
* 🐛 Fix path-x-water erase SFX being too loud when undoing
* 🐛 Remove obvious repetition and sharp cutoff from water erase SFX
* 📎 Save backups: renamed history.json.datetime.bak into history-backup-datetime.json, to make renaming easier, since the file extension is not shown by default in Windows
* 📎 Save backups: add a 30 sec cooldown before a new backup is made
* 🐛 Reduce temporal smearing and edge artifacts on water.
* 🐛 Fix clutter refusing to sit on elevated terrain if there's a wall behind it.
Testing this beta patch
If you'd like to help out and opt into the beta, go to Tiny Glade in your Steam Library, then Properties → Betas → Beta participation → Select "beta-1_13_0".
The save files of this beta are separate from the main version of the game, and this is a beta rather than a regular patch. What does that all mean?
- When using the beta, you won't see the glades you've built in the default branch.
- We made beta saves separate from the regular saves because the beta branch contains new code unavailable in the default branch. Thus, the save files created in beta won't work in the default branch until we merge the beta into the default branch.
- You can however copy your previous saves manually into the beta if you like.
- Saves for the beta are in the "beta-saves" folder alongside "saves" in "C:\Users\YOUR_USER_NAME\Saved Games\Tiny Glade\Steam\YOUR_STEAM_ID" ("~/.local/share/Tiny Glade/Steam/YOUR_STEAM_ID" on Linux)
- The beta saves are not synchronized to Steam Cloud.
- Some stuff might misbehave, and we might need to make changes if necessary. Beware that your beta builds might change
- After the beta is closed, you'll be able to just (manually) copy over your beta saves into the regular saves folder.
- Please see our troubleshooting guide for more information about saves.
How to report a bug
If you encounter something broken, or would like to send any feedback about this preview, we'd appreciate an in-game report using the F6 key 📝 If the matter would benefit from a discussion, you're also welcome to write a comment to this post (but we might take a few days to respond cause we're a bit busy with dev and life things right now).
Thank you! 💗
Love
Tom & Ana