Patch 1.16.5a - stability fixes

Hullo! This is yet another in the series of random fixes.

If the game already works correctly for you: splendid, have a fabulous day! If not, this might help. And if you're into nerdy rants... stay awhile and listen 👴📜

🐛 Fix mysterious rocky "pillars" appearing in glades

We got a few reports of terrain oddly extending into those thin and super tall rocky stalagmites that would also flicker in and out of existence. A bunch of detective work later, those turn out to be GPU-side memory stomping -- some (meta)data that should be written into an image ends up in a seemingly-unrelated buffer, corrupting its contents. I believe this to be an NVIDIA driver bug (or a hardware bug), seemingly only affecting the Pascal architecture (GTX 10x0 series). Those don't get functional driver updates anymore, so Tiny Glade now implements a workaround for it.

🐛 Fix AMD UMA OOM

Don't we all love TLAs? (three-letter acronyms)

We've been getting some Out-Of-Memory errors on AMD systems with Unified Memory Architecture -- basically, laptops and mini PCs powered by integrated AMD graphics.

Those errors have been super silly and weird though. We'd ask the graphics driver to create some textures and buffers, and the driver would go "no probs!"... but when we'd finally try and use them to draw the game's visuals, the driver would then go "oops, out of memory!" ... which is not how things normally go. In any other case, we'd get OOM (out of memory) errors when attempting to create those textures and buffers. Even more funnily, I could see in the logs that the system had plenty of memory, the driver just refused to use it.

Long story short, if you set the "UMA Frame buffer size" in BIOS to something other than "Auto", this by default sets a cap on the max VRAM that apps can use; the driver will refuse to allocate any more of your RAM to graphics. Two ways to solve it: you manually change it to "Auto", or we use a special Vulkan graphics extension to hint to the driver that it should not be derpy. We now do the latter :P

🐛 Harden and fix race conditions in glade loading

Tiny Glade uses a separate background thread for saving the game -- this lets us keep your save files up-to-date continuously without introducing stalls or requiring manual saves. We just send little packets of data over a pipe whenever you edit something -- those packets then reach the save thread and it carefully persists them to disk. The orchestration is rather intricate, and there were a few cases where the main game thread and the save thread could get out of sync with each other, resulting in crashes. This should be much more robust now.

🐛 Sanitize invalid stair segments

This fixes a crashy crash we've had for a while where in an edge case you might end up with an invalid stair segment (e.g. two stair nodes placed exactly, bit-identically on top of each other). Some later interactions with that segment would then create invalid calculations, and make the game panic. Those invalid segments are now carefully... ignored.

🐛 Fix crash when dragging clutter and right-clicking over auto-clutter

Normally when you're interacting with some game element (e.g. dragging a chair), other interaction code should ignore inputs, and not try to interpret them -- you can't be dragging a chair and resizing a building at the same time. One of our gameplay systems was over-eager, trying to do just that, and messing with our internal state management. It promises to be nice now.

🐛 Fix crash on monitor disconnect/change

This we only have sparse logs for, so it's unclear exactly what was happening, but the game would apparently crash sometimes upon some monitor disconnections / changes -- you might know more than we do ^^; It was upsetting some third-party code that we rely on, which will now behave itself.

🐛 Fix crash when drag-n-dropping random files onto the loading screen

I found a crash report in our database where someone dropped a PDF file onto the game while it was loading... The poor thing didn't know what to do and panicked. This just goes to show that if there's an edge case, you folks will find it haha. Well played, well played.

🐛 Fix missing pillars in short wooden stair segments under ladders

Sometimes some short segments would stack in three, put on a trench coat, and pretend to be full supports for stairs. Then they'd also eat pillars, and as a result, stair arches would hover oddly. We're happy to announce that they've been put on a wood-free diet.

🐛 [macOS] Fix load crash when the game is installed on an external drive with some file systems

macOS is a bit funny in that it sometimes creates meta data files that look like other files but aren't. Our code for loading the image filters (LUTs) for photomode was trying to load all ".png" files, but unbeknownst to the code, macOS went and created files like ".somestuff.normalfilename.png" and made the game panic. This would only happen with the game installed on an external drive, and only in some Apple-only-knows cases. The code now skips those funny files, and also ignores (but logs) LUT loading errors.

🛠️ [macOS] Automatically fix folder permissions on launch

Tiny Glade creates a folder to store its data (saves, configs, cache, etc). On some systems, the location at which we attempt to create this folder is inaccessible due to wrong permissions. The game will now detect this, and offer to fix it.

Thanks for coming to our TED talk 🖖

Love, Tom & Ana