Hello~! The new update is finally properly cooked 👨🍳👩🍳 Many thanks to everyone who helped us test it 💚 If you've seen the beta preview post from the last week, we've accumulated a few new fixes - you can see the new additions at the bottom. Hope you enjoy this update!
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 render the image at full resolution, whereas most graphically-intensive games these days support upscaling via DLSS, FSR or XeSS. With those, 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. Compared to TAA with 100% resolution scale, "TGSR Quality" can result in ~50% less GPU power use while maintaining good image quality (note that this is not 2x frame rate, as performance and power have a non-linear relationship). You can enable TGSR in Settings → Video → Image.
(Illustration only; TGSR Ultra Performance is only recommended for very weak graphics cards)
(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)
Steam Deck video settings change
If you play on the Steam Deck, you may notice a change in visuals. We've optimized the default settings to strike a better balance between performance, image clarity, and power use. The Deck now uses "TGSR Quality" by default, and an FPS limit of 30. In our tests, this allows the device to stay cool and quiet, and last around 3h on a full battery, whereas with the previous settings, it was rather loud and power-hungry.
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.
* ⚙ Add graphics quality presets
* 📺️ Add brightness and gamma settings
* 🔊 Iterate on path-x-water SFX
* 🗃 Bump solid vertex color object limit to 32k (things like cloth hangers, some clutter objects)
* 🐛 Fix a bug where dawn jingle volume didn't correspond to music volume (and it would play even when the music was muted)
* 🐛 Fix a gap between terrain and water on the glade border
* 🈂 Add misc missing localizations (the display settings descriptions are coming soon!)
* 🈂 Add localization of Steam Actions (the controller layout menu)
Oh, and last but not least, we fixed large wooden brackets, so now they are properly removed to make space for windows, doors, etc. They will also disappear for buildings with lowest height (for nicer overhangs).
Aaaand, that's all :3 Have a lovely weekend 💗
Love
Ana & Tom
PS: if you helped us test the beta and would like to transfer your beta saves into the main game, see "testing this beta patch" notes in the beta preview post.