Maia

PROBE 233.23.A CONNECTION ESTABLISHED

INCOMING TRANSMISSION:

 

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Update 0.64: Cats and Dogs



Maia 0.64 is here! Cats, Dogs, Hurricanes, GUI, detailed new AI and lots of optimisations and fixes! Here’s a quick video showing off some of the cool new things.

MEOW

Firstly we have the cats. Based off the pets of our Kickstarter backers, our feline friends have travelled across the cosmos to keep us company (when they feel like it), damage furniture and sleep in a lot in inconvenient places. They will, very occasionally, socialise with the colonists and boost moods around the base.

WOOF

The dogs make themselves a little more useful. Defending the territory of the base, they will follow patrol routes, noting weaknesses in the bases defences as they go, iterating and improving their coverage. They will alert and then defend against alien incursion, barking and growling at any intruder. They can also be given move orders which they will (sometimes) obey and integrate into their guarding behaviour.

It’s not all work, they will also distract colonists for tummy rubs, boosting moods and fulfilling the social needs of the lonely. Whether the dogs make friends with the cats or not is up to the cats, and so is a rare and unpredictable occurrence.

RAWR

The alien creature AI is now more dynamic, with all species now having social structures and breeding patterns. They now suffer from fear and panic and so can be forced out the base using your dogs to herd them, rather than using the weak and unpredictable colonists.

WOOSH

Hurricanes can now make landfall and threaten your bases. These catastrophic events will build up over time, tearing apart equipment on the surface and shutting down wind and solar generation. They will also leave a lasting effect on the weather simulation, leaving drastic pressure changes that will take weeks to normalise. On the bright side you’ll generate a lot of wind power before the turbines go into lock down and/or explode.

CLICK

There are many changes to the UI, but a key one is the new finder panels opened by clicking the colonist, warning and robot buttons on the left hand side. These provide an easier way to find a specific colonist, robot or problem with the base. The warning panel now focuses on many of the smaller issues that a base may face, allowing you to isolate and fix smaller issues before everyone dies in an embarrassing manner.

Autosaves are now in game, so you will always have a base to go back to when you “accidentally” murder everyone in your charge by locking them in a room with no doors and a hundred angry chickens.

TWINKLE

The lighting engine has had some major rewrites and optimisations. This will allow for more extravagant base designs at higher and smoother frame rates. Remember, your choice of lighting will have a noticeable impact on the moods of your colonists.

Many shaders and effects have been tweaked or in some cases rewritten, leading to more natural lighting and more aesthetically pleasing visuals.

Beyond lies the.. WUB

The dogs aren’t the only woofers you’ll be hearing in 0.64! We’ve implemented many new sounds and reworked some of the existing ones to add more feedback from the game and realistic detail in the soundscape.

Other Tweaks:

  • Over-ripe crops will suffer less blight progression.
  • Airlock cycles and new door models.
  • Wall heaters now turn off at 26 rather than 30 degrees.
  • Several late game food generation issues addressed
  • New font tweaks for better shadows and easier reading.
  • Text button active areas better fitted to buttons.
  • Several texture compression artifacts fixed.
  • Screenspace raytraced reflections corrected.
  • Creature territory systems optimised
  • Events and dangers generation balanced and tweaked for longer games.
  • Thousands of small optimisations and code modernisations.
  • More temporary names in the colonist generator (Kickstarter names list coming soon!)

That’s all for now. I will be back soon with more updates, content, fixes and softly spoken update videos. Get yourself on the Steam development branch to get them as they go live. All feedback is appreciated!



Update 0.63: Lost in Space



Maia 0.63 is ready. This update brings a lot of new features as well as an overhaul of the game’s simulation and balance. I want to say thank you to everyone who gave feedback over the summer, it’s helped me improve the game significantly. Here’s a video of me playing the latest build and showing off some of the new features:

 

AWOL

If treated poorly enough, colonists can now leave the base and head off to their inevitable deaths in the barren wastelands of Maia. Fulfilling food, rest, social needs and building an aesthetically pleasing base will all be important to keeping them loyal. That said, some colonists are just cowards, so don’t feel too bad about them.

High Energy

The games bodily simulation of the colonists has been made more accurate with heat loss through convection, conduction and radiation in different mediums. Colonist metabolisms are finer tuned with effects from sweat, to kinetic energy losses affecting them as they go about their days. Keep your colony warm and sources of water abundant to keep them happy, efficient, and breathing.

 

Maian Time Slip

The day length of Maia has been made longer. This will give your colonists more time to carry out essential.. and less essential tasks, and take the pressure off growing colonies. Conversely with the slower simulation of the climate and weather, and longer nights, solar and wind generation will now be more challenging to keep online, requiring a greater focus on efficient storage and energy management.

 

 

Notable Changes since 0.62:

  • IMPs no longer get stuck sparking.
  • IMPs will now place minerals in the smelter. They cannot start it themselves however so you will have to manually – or wait for a colonist.
  • Player now receives an email when they lose all their IMP robots.
  • Flywheels can be clicked on to be put into charge only mode. Allowing you to store energy for emergencies.
  • PAUSE BUTTON added to the UI. Pausing no longer causes glitching, is compatible with the building UI. (Don’t get too used to the bottom left placement, it’s going in the top right soon)
  • UI changes to hide text and mouse attached objects when hovering over buttons.
  • Mouse now sits properly infront of UI items.
  • Condenser now has visible running water when clicked on or used.
  • Minerals make dust clouds when dropped or clicked on.
  • Workshop table, bodybags, foot packets, grass and other items now have click reactions.
  • Alien plant samples have a nice mist effect.
  • Numerous tweaks to AI and balancing.
  • Large amounts of food creation balancing.
  • Food preparation bugs fixed.
  • All food KJ calculated more accurately based on the correct breeds and in many cases have increased substantially (potatoes and chickens are over double what they were).
  • Ration packs are now far more likely to be built.
  • Ration packs can be opened by colonists and the player.
  • Colonist standard and binge meal sizes increased.
  • Condensers now advertise the high level “water purification” need (like the solar stills) so are better prioritised when building.
  • Many small optimisations and a huge amount of code cleanup. Potentially fixing a lot of bugs and likely preventing future ones.
  • Missing rain fixed.
  • Food trays appearing “unbuilt” issue fixed.
  • Colonists now simulate heat radiation and conduction due to convection on their skin.
  • Colonists put less direct heat into a room (as roughly 20% is put into kinectic/mechanical energy)
  • Fix for missing molerat animation causing a crash.
  • Smelting priority tweaks.
  • Stockpiling bugs fixed.
  • Creation of hydroponics planters priority increased.
  • Bug fixed on determining food creation priority need.
  • Colonists with suitable skills (construction) will be able to produce twice as much building materials from the smelter.
  • Colonists are less likely to hoard materials.
  • Colonists can now binge on food if they need to make up more than one meal. This means they can eat 10000kj of energy rather than the usual 6000kj.
  • Colonist energy needs slightly balanced to account for heat generated by food digestion.
  • Wind turbines will take more damage before advertising repair task to colonists (although will repair bots will maintain the current level)
  • Fix for black tiles being left when a door is removed.
  • Doors sat in the middle of rooms will now automatically be set to be destroyed by colonists.
  • Fix for missing text on the Fusion and Fission reactors.
  • Fix for KW/W mixups.
  • Fix for IMPs not picking up fossils.
  • Desks now moveable by colonists.
  • Fix for colonists not filling up the storage room shelves with raw food once a prep station has become full.
  • Smelter now advertises it’s need for minerals sooner after being emptied. This should speed up construction of building materials marginally.
  • Stockpile settings for building materials lowered so people get less stuck if they don’t realise they should be managing it.
  • Stockpile settings panels now comes up when mousing over a room. Hopefully people will realise it exists now.
  • Window sizing bug fixes.
  • Full screen now works far better.
  • Rendering quality improved.

 

That’s all for now. If you like these updates be sure to drop us feedback via Twitter and Steam reviews. I’d really love some up to date Steam reviews.