Maia News — January 27, 2023
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
It's Maia update time! This build brings features, fixes, interface, optimisations and Steam Deck and controller support to the game.
Cartographics! The new map pop up allows you to see the layout of your base quickly, track colonists and robots, spot threats and fires and to move around the map fast. Switching between the overlay modes also allows you to see atmosphere and temperature conditions in your base.
Controller support! The game now has controller support that will allow you to play the game on most modern controllers, compatible accessibility devices and of course portable PC devices such as the Steam Deck.
To support low power mobile devices the game has been deeply optimised. As well as general improvements, several large frame-time spikes have been eradicated, which should keep it running smoothly. The memory footprint of the game code has also been painstaking optimised down by about 25%. This means that lower end machines will benefit from better performance, and huge bases on large heavily populated maps on regular machines should run much smoother too.
Petting the animals in the game now has better feedback with a new cursor animation and friendlier AI responses from the dogs, and of course, absolute apathy from the cats. Keeping your animals social needs fulfilled will make them more eager to defend your base and catch any invading insects. It will also stop dogs distracting the colonists so much and the cats from destroying the furniture (maybe).
Other changes:
- Fixed a shader issue with AMD GPU driver support that was stopping the game from running for some users.
- Pause button on keyboard now rebindable.
- Fix for colonists trying to make small adjustments whilst running causing them to abruptly come to a half and then start running again.
- Upgraded SDL support.
- Objective flashing animation improved.
- Rain textures and animation improved.
- Grid simulation no longer shows invalid values on energy storage devices when the game is paused.
- Lava simulation optimised and threading removed to prevent crashes. (Full lava rewrite postponed due to complexity)
- Colonists will now prioritise the meteor pickups in the second level of the campaign.
- Massively reduced the constraint iterations on the cloth simulations to improve CPU performance when the player has lots of flags.
- Fix for incorrect light colour in Radiation Containment room.
- Protobird sleep behaviour fixed to stop it running automatically into groom behaviour.
- Capsules landing will no longer set the ground on fire if the ground is covered in snow.
Join us on the Discord to show off you base, report bugs, request features and chat with the community.
On the deck I recommend using the Proton GE for maximum compatibility.
Linux builds will go live this evening.
That’s it for now. More updates coming soon™!
See all the changes going into the codebase as they happen on https://dev.maiagame.com/