[BETA 1.16] Wood, flowers, Workshop, ... — Tiny Glade News

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[p align="start"]Yarr harr me hearties, it's time to unleash the kraken! We’ve been taming it for a while but it might still be a bit spiky and capricious. With your help, we’ll house-train it to be all soft and cuddly like the sheep :3 Which is to say, we have tested the beta internally and deemed it safe to use, but we’d still appreciate your help in finding any sneaky bugs, crashes, glitches, etc. If you find any, please don't hesitate to send in-game feedback (F6), post on Discord, or in Steam forums. If you need a reminder on how betas work and how to opt-in, please see instructions at the bottom of the post. The previous beta (stairs) was rather large. This one is a chonk. Originally, we wanted to have a smallish beta focused on just wooden walls, but then… it grew, um… a bit ^^; We've added a bunch of new features, UX improvements, fixes and also done a lot of mopping behind the scenes. Let's start with the exciting new stuffs!

Features

Wooden walls, stone foundations

[p align="start"]This is the highlight of the coming update. A lot could be said about it, but it’s better experienced :3 Our initial prototypish version had a lot of tricky edge cases as usual, and it took a few iterations to figure out all the 4D chess: cutting window holes out of planks, placing the wooden and brick frames around windows in all the right places, tippy-tappy creaky audio for all the permutations, what happens if you raise the stone foundation all the way up, and so on. There's all the stuff mentioned in our last Dev Diary: wooden walls with horizontal & vertical planks, stone foundations, wooden fences (vertical planks only). It should all behave itself now, so all those Nordic villages can now be safely tinygladeified ✨

Wooden stairs

[p align="start"]Once we got the wooden walls working, something still felt amiss. You'd have an olde wooden building, and then plop stairs on it and... they wouldn't quite fit, being all brick-like. So we went and added wooden stairs too. Just like with wooden buildings, you switch the material via the color customization tool.

New meadow plants

[p align="start"]We've expanded our gardening tools -- you can now paint colorful flowers and grain plants in the meadow. You can "paint over" the same plant to make it bushier too. The grass is also much more detailed now, and looks fluffier in the distance.

Nerd trivia: this started as just a tech investigation: we'd been quietly scheming about maaaybe supporting larger glades in the future 🤫 and... our grass system just wouldn't scale. A few bathtubs of coffee later we had a new authoring & rendering system, loosely inspired by "Nanite Foliage", and it enabled us to add all sorts of plants, not just grass.

Controllable fog

[p align="start"]The "time of day" menu now has controls for fog. You can change its density, height, and how much it clings to the ground. Just as with time passage, you can keep it locked however you like, or let it do its thing over time. In winter glades, there is now a snow control, too. And since we know you're really here for the nerd trivia: this took a complete rewrite of our participating media renderer; we've now switched to the "froxels" method, which also allowed us to cheaply integrate local lights, so lanterns illuminate the fog now 💡

Workshop support

[p align="start"]In Swedish, there's a wonderful word: "nja". It's a blend of "nej" (no) and "ja" (yes). It was also our typical response to "does Tiny Glade support mods?"... Njaaaaaaa it kinda does, but you basically have to replace the game's own files, and it's a bit of a mess. We're shifting that a bit towards "jaaa": we're adding some Workshop support:

Mods can add new clutter items to the game (the stuff that spawns around windows and that you can move around)
Existing community mods that rely on asset replacement can now be shared via Workshop too (Tiny Farms, Eastern Glade, Tiny Ocean, etc)

Hint: modded clutter loads automatically. Other mods you need to enable per glade: Hit Escape, then MODS → GLADE MODS.

[p align="start"] This doesn't mean that Tiny Glade is now infinitely moddable -- you can't turn it into a racing game or add new doodling tools, metal walls, etc. That kinda thing mostly flies in games made in C# or Java, where modders can decompile the bytecode and go wild. Mod developers: here's some info for y'all!

Editing tools

Clutter picker UI

[p align="start"]Have you ever woken up at night thinking, "I wish Tiny Glade had more UI windows"? Yeah, we thought so too... Don't worry, we got you. We've been itching to add a new UI window somewhere but couldn't figure out where to put it. After much research and deliberation, we figured "ehh, I guess let's just add a clutter picker". So as a side effect I suppose it's now easier to change clutter -- especially if you download a bunch of clutter mods.

Grouping and group move / rotation

[p align="start"]This one is not a new window, but hopefully still useful. You can select multiple buildings/walls/fences together and move/rotate them as a group. The groups can also be bookmarked, so next time you want to nudge that elaborate castle tower by 2cm eastward, you don't need to re-select the whole thing again. The default controls: right-click one building, then while holding Left Ctrl, right-click another, and another, and...

Freehand wall / fence rotation

[p align="start"]Once we added the ability to rotate groups, we realized that it was the only way to rotate freehand walls/fences... so for completeness, we also added rotation to the latter.

Misc UX stuffs

Always-on input hints

[p align="start"]We got inspired by how accessible some simulator games are, so we nicked an idea from them: the left side of the screen now has a box that always shows input/controls hints, based on the current tool, item being highlighted, etc. We think it's a nice discoverability boost, but if it makes you feel like you're playing Orbital Welding Simulator 2026, you can disable it in settings.

Cursor-centered toolbar popup

[p align="start"]We also got slightly envious of games that have radial menus for quickly accessing commands. So we figured we could shorten our mouse travel distance as well. Mashing Spacebar (or the mouse "Back" button) will now bring up a compact version of the toolbar wherever your cursor is. You don't even need to click on any of the icons -- just release the key/button. If those keys aren't quite your vibe, you can rebind "Quick tools" in settings.`

Quick eraser for raster tools

[p align="start"]When painting paths/cobblestone/plants/water, you can hold the "disable snapping" key (Left Ctrl by default) to temporarily switch to the eraser for the active tool -- so if you draw a path too far, you don't need to undo it and redraw it; you can just quickly erase it without embarking on a toolbar round-trip.

More flexible input binding

[p align="start"]We've refactored our input binding system. Previously inputs could only be either keys or mouse buttons. Now they can be either. Or both. So for example if you play on a touchpad and "right click" is awkward for camera rotation, you can bind it to a key now.

Hit "Delete" to nuke the selected object

[p align="start"]Anything that has "focus mode" (right click by default) can now be deleted via the keyboard "Delete" key (configurable, of course).

A button to open a saved glade's folder

[p align="start"]In the glade load screen, there's a folder icon under each glade. Click it to open the operating system's file explorer in that save's folder. No more sorting folders and chasing after random hexadecimal strings to find where your glade lives.

Focus-mode gizmo hygiene

[p align="start"]When manipulating tiny shapes / wall pieces in "focus mode", the chonky UI gizmos would often obscure most of the thing you're trying to nudge. Unnecessary gizmos now fade away, so you can get that 1mm placement precision you've always wanted.

Behind the scenes

Bumped most object limits to 1 million

[p align="start"]We used to have individual limits for various objects, e.g. "you can only have N thousand windows" or "N hundred plant pots", rooted in being frugal with video memory use. Some players would then run out of those windows / plant pots, and we'd need to decide whether to bump memory requirements for everyone. We've now refactored all that, and now we dynamically allocate memory as needed. You can have up to 1 million of all the things now.

Max walls 10k -> 128k

[p align="start"]A few players have also run out of walls while drawing intricate mosaics out of tiny wall fragments. We've shipped contraband builds to a few people, raising their limit to 20k walls. Well, after some code plumbing on our side, everyone gets to enjoy up to 131,072 walls now.

Roofs now bounce & block indirect light

[p align="start"]We use ray tracing for indirect light, but it's not the fancy RTX-like ray tracing that modern GPUs have -- ours is very potato so that it can run on old machines. It uses heavily-simplified geometry, and before this update, completely lacked roofs. Well, we're upgrading the potato slightly: roofs are now welcome in our Bounding Volume Hierarchy, and lighting is a bit more realistic around them.

[p align="start"]BTW if this makes your indoor scenes too dark, give us a shout!

TGSR 2.0

[p align="start"]Tiny Glade doesn't support DLSS, FSR or XeSS. Instead we have our own thing: TGSR -- Tiny Glade Super Resolution, painstakingly eyeballed and hand-tuned for Tiny Glade. It runs on all our hardware targets, it's cheaper than the big upscalers from GPU vendors, but it's not the pinnacle of image quality. We're improving that with TGSR 2.0. It uses a tiiiiiiny neural network to make better decisions about color than a hand-tuned thing realistically could. It should run as fast as TGSR 1.0, but look more stable and less ghosty.

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TGSR version 1.0 vs 2.0, "Performance" preset; zoomed-in to highlight artifacts; BTW I really like this build but I can't remember where I got it -- probably F6 feedback; thank you <3

New rendering backend

[p align="start"]This is mostly a nerd note, but we've rewritten our Vulkan renderer's backend, fixing some subtle bugs in the process (and possibly adding exciting new ones, as is the rule). The new one is easier on the CPU, so if you have a beefy GPU, your framerate might improve in heavier builds. Let us know if you get any unusual GPU-related crashes though.

More precise shadows

[p align="start"]Our shadow maps now adapt rather precisely to what the camera is seeing. This typically results in higher-fidelity shadows near and far. Nerd note: we've switched to Sample Distribution Shadow Maps + receiver-mask-based culling. Volumetrics wanted to ruin it all, so we also ray trace tiny cascaded shadow maps for the fog.

\[Linux] SDL2 & Steam Overlay

[p align="start"]The care and feeding of operating system windows and event pumps is a surprisingly nuanced art. We mainly use the winit library (crate) to deal with it, which works well enough on MS Windows, but on Linux we ran into trouble with Steam Overlay, which makes assumptions incompatible with winit. To placate Steam, we're adding SDL2 support to the game, and switching to it by default on Linux. This should make Steam Overlay work without gamescope tricks or Proton.

The windowing backend is switchable, so if SDL2 gives you any trouble, opt for winit via:

--window-backend winit

Misc

Visual

Color menu: the secondary ring is now always aligned with the primary one. Magic color options are only shown when the clicked segment is affected
Fix platform stairs assembled at a wrong angle sometimes when going over a rectangle's corner
Some sections of the wood railings on stone stairs are now curved (to better represent curvature)
Fixed some wood textures not tiling properly
Fixed stitch bricks not covering gable roof sides
Fixed incorrect ladder mesh spawned when gates on stone buildings are on steep terrain
Fixed halftimbering circular beams having no side faces when split by a window (aka no caps)
Fixed camera not rotating when high up
Reduced brickitis (bricks popping through plaster as you zoom out -- the distant brick LoD is now an SDF because we always need more raymarching in the game... thanks for coming to my TED talk)
Improved indirect lighting stability and detail

Audio

Tweaked the strength of path draw audio
Rotating single-node stairs now plays the correct sound (and not the same as rotating a lantern)
Walking on wooden floors now correctly triggers wooden footsteps instead of stone
Trapdoors now play unique sounds for wooden and stone floors. So do flags.

Stability

Fixed some stuttering on Linux (due to incorrect Vulkan swapchain usage)
Fixed race condition in mouse cursor visibility management
Aaand a bunch of crashy crashes have been un-crashy-crashed.

Testing this beta version

[p align="start"]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_16_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 %USERPROFILE%\\Saved Games\\Tiny Glade\\Steam\\YOUR_STEAM_ID (~/.local/share/Tiny Glade/Steam/YOUR_STEAM_ID/saves on Linux and macOS)
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 glades might change during the testing period
After the beta is closed, you'll be able to just (manually) copy over your beta saves into the regular saves folder.

[p align="start"] Please see our troubleshooting guide for more information about saves. Thank you for reading and playing! We hope you have fun 💚

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Love, Tom & Ana (and Martin)

Known issues

We'll be investigating bugs and glitches, but it might take a while for us to land fixes. Meanwhile, let's have a workaround section here:

If mods don't load for you, restart Steam. We've only just enabled Workshop, and for some folks, Steam seems to be blocking downloads, pretending there's still no Workshop ^^;
If you don't see beta-1_16_0 on the list... restart... Steam. Thank Gaben :P

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This announcement was written and published by the developers/publisher of Tiny Glade on Steam; it is mirrored here unedited for readability, with full credit and a link to the original above. © the respective rights holders. Rights holder and want it removed? Email us — we take it down promptly.