We have some new flavors for you to sample today ???? A sweet & spicy stew including a new feature and a dash of your favorite spice - graphics fixes. The current batch has a bit of a kick though, so unless you're in the mood for that, you might want to come back once we've refined the recipe.
We've prepared a Steam "beta" that you can opt into if you'd like to preview this patch. There's also one more twist: the save files for this beta are separate from the base version of the game - but more on that in a bit.
New option for freehand walls
We've added a new toggle in the color customization menu for freehand walls. The option tells the wall whether it should follow the terrain slope or whether it should maintain a constant max height. This will hopefully eliminate the need to meticulously cut a wall into small chunks just to straighten it ???? Additionally, if constant height is chosen, the top row of bricks will be filled-in and arches will also maintain constant max height.
Graphics fixes
This new branch integrates fixes from the "rad5k" beta, together with the "lower-gpu-mem-req" beta, and further includes some memory optimizations, that reduce VRAM usage by some 100-200MB. Together, those should also help startup crashes that were due to out-of-memory conditions.
We've been struggling with the Radeon RX 5x00 XT (RDNA 1.0) series of graphics cards being just odd and crashing in mysterious ways. We still don't know the root cause, and it's proving difficult to find. Sometimes random poking at some of our rendering code seems to make it go away, only for it to resurface in a few minutes. AMD's public tools for investigating those issues require at least the RX 6000 series, but we verified our code on NVIDIA machines using their Aftermath SDK, and only spotted one benign issue. The workaround from the "rad5k" branch is the only consistent thing that resolves the crashes so far, which is why we'll be going with that.
We're not integrating the "vk10" or "vk11" betas yet, as we haven't heard enough evidence that they actually helped anyone. If you're an NVIDIA user struggling from the "ERROR_INCOMPATIBLE_DRIVER", do give them a try, but if that doesn't help, the steps on our dedicated troubleshooting page might.
Misc
A few folks have run into window count limits, so we've bumped those.
Testing this patch preview
As mentioned earlier, 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.
- You can however copy your 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)
- Please see our troubleshooting guide for more information about saves.
- The beta saves are not synchronized to Steam Cloud.
- Some stuff might misbehave, and we might need to makes changes if necessary. Beware that your builds might change ^^
- 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 main game.
- After the beta is closed, you'll be able to just (manually) copy over your beta saves into the default branch.
With all that in mind, if you'd like to opt into the beta, and help us test this new batch of changes, go to Tiny Glade in your Steam Library, then Properties → Betas → Beta participation → Select "beta-1_9_0".
Thank you!
Love
Tom & Ana
