Tiled Development Update (June 2026)
Published on July 6, 2026 by Thorbjørn Lindeijer
Dear sponsors,
As promised last month, I'm writing monthly updates again! With the Tiled 1.13 cycle underway I've said goodbye to Qt 5, the two Google Summer of Code projects are progressing steadily, and a number of contributions were merged.
Kicking Off Tiled 1.13
The first big step for Tiled 1.13 is in: the minimum supported Qt version was raised to 6.2 (#4526), which means Tiled has finally dropped support for Qt 5. This cleared out a good deal of compatibility cruft, and new code can now freely rely on Qt 6 APIs.
In the same spirit, the snap package was finally migrated to Qt 6 based on the kde-neon-6 platform, and now supports the s390x and ppc64el architectures again (#4541, #4535).
Google Summer of Code
Both contributors are making steady progress on their projects:
- Kanishka (Enhanced World Editing) landed a configurable world grid (#4534) and resize handles for maps in the world view (#4545), so maps in a world can now be resized by simply dragging their edges.
- Dagon Williams (new hardware renderer) made MapLoader.map provide an EditableMap, so loaded maps can be modified by scripts (#4520), improved the precision of the grid shader (#4542), added a preference for choosing the renderer (#4537), and made the new renderer load TiledQuick's QML components (#4544). Work on tool support has started with the tile brush (#4547).
We also had two nice video calls this month: one with Dagon and both mentors to sync up on the renderer work, and a second one two weeks later with both contributors present.
Scripting API Additions
The scripting API saw two additions. I added an API for creating and editing tile layer cells (#4538), which enables scripted tools and importers to work with flip flags directly. And @MatusGuy contributed MapObject.resolvedClassName() (#4529), which resolves the class of template-instantiated objects.
Community Contributions
- @IoriBranford added the %exportfile and %exportpath command variables (#4476), handy for custom commands that operate on the exported map. They also made the Tile Rectangle tool in tiled-extensions respect flip and rotate flags (#28).
- @dogboydog added a preference to make "pressing a tool's shortcut again switches back to the previous tool" optional, now off by default (#4540).
- @digitalby modernized the macOS app icon for macOS 26 "Liquid Glass" (#4522). Getting this shipped took some CI work on my end, since the new icon format requires building the macOS package with the latest Xcode.
- The bulk-animations extension by @lukas-shawford moved into the mapeditor organization for shared maintenance (#11). A performance pass by @Brandonn-Etheve, which caches tileset geometry and batches undo macros, was merged right away (#10), and @Lillious is working on a TypeScript rewrite of the plugin (#12).
Stability and Maintenance
Based on a crash report from Sentry, a crash in the object selection tool when the selection becomes empty while starting a move was fixed (#4536). Another crash fix, addressing dangling action pointers in the ActionManager, is still in review (#4551).
On the build side, the CI now installs Qbs from the official releases (#4539) and requires Qbs 1.23 for MSVC builds (#4543).
Thank You!
A wisdom tooth removal slowed me down a little mid-month, but overall June was a productive start of the new release cycle. As always, thank you all for your support! It is what allows me to keep working on Tiled, reviewing contributions, and mentoring our two GSoC contributors this summer. See you in the next update!
Cheers,
Thorbjørn