Maia News — January 22, 2021
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
Greetings from the tier 5 exclusion zone! I hope this update finds you well, or at least alive.
Drop in on the Discord and let us know how you are doing.
MAIA now features a brand new ray-marched voxelised shadow system allowing every light in your base to cast accurate dynamic shadows into the world. This system really augments a colony’s atmosphere, doesn’t require any ray-tracing specific hardware and also won’t totally obliterate your frame rate.
Continuing the visual improvements, several new colonist head variations are now in the game, and the quality of many existing game textures has been increased. A multitude of small visual tweaks and polish improvements have been carefully worked in to improve the general feel and aesthetic.
Along with with the new lighting system and graphics improvements the game has been given a deep optimisation pass on the core game code and graphics pipeline. This means that densely populated maps with a mature ecosystem simulation and a large number of colonists, robots and creatures will see performance gains of up to 30-40% on a middle range CPU, which can lead to a much smoother frame rate.
On the GPU you may see up to a 15% increase in frames per second (with the new ray shadows switched off). The engine also now caches generated code, shaders and other data and will load the game several seconds faster.
The user interface was feeling a little left out so we gave it some love too. The middle click menu has now been extended to room placement to for those who prefer a list based selection. Many menu boxes, buttons and pop up texts have been given shadows and extra borders to improve readability in high contrast scenes.
Other changes:
• Changing texture settings on the fly no longer causes glitches.
• MSAA settings changes are improved.
• Several menu options now require an “apply” click to help stop accidental changes.
• The game will now spawn a much lower number of threads and use them better.
• Screen space reflections straightened slightly.
• Support for OpenGL 4.5 added.
• The GUI now has a visual autosave notification.
• Text colours are fixed when on in-game colonist selection screens.
• The outbreaks of contagious colonist hypochondria have been reduced.
• Colonist needs balanced.
• The Utility bots will wait less for jobs.
• Colonists need to be a lot more fatigued to go AWOL.
• Colonist trauma will fade significantly faster.
• Colonists will now need to be closer to cave-ins to be traumatised by them.
• Room temperatures will now simulate more accurately.
• Game log files updated to newer more detailed format.
• Better shader loading verification.
• Lots of small AI tweaks.
• Intel 3000HD support dropped and fired into the sun.
• Instability caused by giant wildfires fixed.
We'll be back soon with more features and fixes. Watch the updates as they happen on the dev site.