Tiled Development Update (August 2026)
Published on September 2, 2026 by Thorbjørn Lindeijer
Dear sponsors,
As mentioned in my previous update, I was on holiday for the first half of August, so this update may be a little shorter than usual.
Wrapping Up GSoC 2026
The coding period ended on 24 August and final evaluations were due by 31 August. Both contributors passed, even if their projects are not entirely done yet. This last month was mostly review rounds on work covered in earlier updates, plus one new pull request each:
- Kanishka (@kanishka0411, Enhanced World Editing) added drag-to-create maps in the world view (#4590). Her fix for the view jumping when undoing map resizes and moves landed after a last round of changes.
- Dagon Williams (@UltraDagon, new hardware renderer) implemented non-orthogonal orientation support for the Qt Quick renderer (#4585), while his object layer support went through several more rounds. Both are still in review.
Both have said they want to keep contributing after the program, which would be great! My thanks to Adam Turk for co-mentoring the renderer project and to Erik Schilling for backing me up as mentor and org admin.
Scripting: A Script Server
My main new work this month was a script server and matching command-line options (#4597). It lets you evaluate a script in a running Tiled instance from the terminal and read back its output, result and any errors, instead of copying things in and out of the Console view by hand.
The server listens on a local socket that only accepts connections from the same user, and is off unless you enable it in the Preferences or pass --script-server. The new --eval and --eval-file options talk to it. This makes it possible for external tools, including AI agents, to control Tiled to the full extent of the Tiled scripting API.
Keyboard Shortcuts for the Dock Views
You can soon assign a shortcut to any of the built-in docks (#4598) and scripts can trigger them with tiled.trigger("ViewConsole") and friends. No default shortcuts are assigned for now.
Declarative QML Extensions
I continued the QML extensions work from last month (#4568) and I would still welcome your thoughts on it. To make it easier to try, I put together a branch that combines it with the script server so that CI produces packages containing both (#4599).
Merged Community Contributions
- @exoego finished a huge update to libtiled-java, bringing up-to-date TMX support (#4325).
- @rhythmcache made painting over or erasing existing tiles a lot faster on large maps, since replacing a tile with one from a different tileset no longer rescans the whole layer on every repaint (#4595, fixes #4185). Their original PR was lost when their fork was deleted, so I opened a new one with their fix.
- @shubhrai23 started a patch to fix restoring the window layout for maximized windows (#4586), which I finished up after testing exposed some additional issues.
Thank You!
Thank you for supporting Tiled development! Your support is what made this year's Summer of Code participation and other upcoming improvements in Tiled 1.13 possible.
A word on the months ahead: sponsorships currently cover about 40% of full-time work, and for the past year I have made up the difference from reserves at Open Collective. With these reserves mostly depleted, I am taking on other work to close the gap, so Tiled development may slow down for a little while. I will keep writing monthly updates regardless, to keep you informed!
Cheers,
Thorbjørn