Maia 0.59 is now live. This update brings the threat of dangerous alien creature incursions into the base. Don’t panic! Your colonists are now armed and ready for them, with new patrol behaviours to hunt down and eradicate the threat. 0.59 also brings a multitude of cool new features, such as the command and control room, new UI changes, AI updates and hundreds of bug fixes.

Here’s a video of me showcasing some of the new features:

Invasions.

The local creatures are now far more likely to breach a base that sits within their territory. They may enter to steal livestock and rations or just to mark their territory by destroying your vital equipment. Colonists are ready for them however with new side arms and patrol behaviours to locate and destroy the intruders.

Special Stuff

Not all the local wildlife is a menace. With ecological research, the nocturnal aliens can now be captured, domesticated, bred and slaughtered for high quality tasty food production.

Overseer

The new command and control room gives your colonists better command oversight of your base. It lifts the population cap and provides a map table that gives insight to the movement of colonists and threats to your base. It’s thermal mode allows you to spot issues with heat distribution within your network of rooms.

Easy Reading

UI accessibility has taken a step forward with a new dyslexic mode for the game that presents a dyslexia friendly font and increases text sizes throughout the game. Dynamic drop shadows have also been added on overlay text to ease reading in high contrast scenes and many button behaviours have been tweaked to stop misclicks and other small annoyances.

T’annoy

Several base announcements have been added to provide feedback for many base systems such as power grid issues, blackouts caused by solar storms and energy storage depletion. The announcer will also warn of incoming natural disasters, base events and fire emergencies.

Basophobia

The games’s pathfinding systems have been improved, which should lead to less issues with complex build orders and also see greater performance gains on low end machines.

Rough change log since 0.58:

• Colonists now carry and use sidearms.
• Colonists will now patrol inside the base .
• Colonists with markspersonship skills are now more effective at shooting.
• Rifle firing outside is better in synced in sound and animation. Includes tracer rounds pfx.
• Alien protobirds can now eat ration packs, dead voxnocturnus and also… other protobirds.
• Protobirds can attack worklights and other base equipment.
• Alien bum scooting animations no longer give the creatures too much velocity.
• Sound lure now makes voxnocturnus clicking sounds .
• Dyslexic mode added and several GUI changes made for readability.
• 2x MSAA added.
• Flare burn time now saved to stop them all reigniting on load and creating a headache inducing din.
• New colonist emails to ask for medical and research rooms.
• IMP AI tightened up to prevent dawdling.
• IMP sound and pfx synced to animations.
• Many more objects generate heat from wasted electricity.
• Super capacitor energy storage now degrades much slower.
• Object holograms given bases to aid placement.
• Base announcements for fires, earthquakes, solar events, energy storage depletion and more.
• Utility robot wheels now kick up dirt.
• Damage particle effects added to many objects.
• Control room added. Colonist cap reduced to eight, control room raises that to 12.
• Map table added with sonic mapping and thermal mapping modes.
• New research for alien domestication and captive breeding.
• Some research perks now have prerequisite research that is needed before they can be discovered.
• Medical bed interaction point moved to stop colonists getting stuck using it.
• Chicken wandering behaviour fixes. They will now seek out the livestock room faster and not wander out of it so much.
• IMP pathfinding and framerate issues fixed when stuck in in anomalous locations.
• Room update improvements and optimisations. Larger bases supported.
• Fix for occasional bug where a room tile is not deletable on right click.
• Fix for loads failing because the ongoing mission flag was not set and the game exiting back to menu in the blink of an eye.
• Atmosphere spread in subrooms of large blue casing areas fixed and optimised.
• New colonist surnames added.
• Game world rendering improved and optimised.
• Airlocks no longer cause intermittent pathfinding blockage. Reducing the chance of issues with building outside.
• Rooms no longer locked on startup allowing colonists to wander about before an initial room is placed.
• Crop blight adjusted to be less predictable.
• Colonists will now assign a higher priority to body-bagging up corpses.
• IMPs will no longer use hoppers when not carrying enough materials.
• Flywheel integrity degradation adjusted, colonists will consequently no longer spend as much time trying to fix them as a high priority task.
• AI agent path verification on world changes optimised. Building, locking doors, cave ins and digging should cause less CPU spikes.
• Colonist and IMP idle behaviours now checked against reachable sectors. Should reduce failed pathfinds and improve performance.
• Dog pathfinding optimised.
• Cat pathfinding optimised.
• Several spelling mistakes fixed
• Potential data corruption fixes.
• Every item in the game now has a very simple description of what it does in general terms when placing it.
• Basic food production added to the tutorial.
• Basic explanation of the heat mechanics added to the tutorial
• Colonist requests can now be answered with a y/n key press. Those are rebindable in the menu options.
• Build priority added to the tutorial. (Double click on items to set them higher!)
• Objects no longer maintain high priority after being built.
• Cave ins and structural weaknesses no longer persist between level changes. This may also prevent a crash.
• Colonists will now be less likely to over run when approaching an object. Stopping them getting stuck in and behind things.
• Dracaena plant selection fixed and readded to the game.
• More rooms given the selection of three aesthetic plants.
• Aesthetic plants no longer spread blight.
• Aesthetic plants no longer show Kj of energy stored in them like food plants as they are quite inedible.
• Colonists will no longer join a team meeting if they are already going to an action with a high need.
• Sounds added for loading and saving and for successful and failed loads.
• Greyed out buttons now capture input so elements behind them can not be clicked on.
• When an email is open no left or right clicks will be accepted apart from to the email manager buttons.
• Emails can be dismissed with a right click.
• No input is accepted for a fraction of a moment after closing an email to prevent misclicks that might cause dig orders etc to be placed.
• Hud no longer updates when the player is in first person, stopping it grabbing input or applying the screen darkening effect.
• Chickens no longer self destruct after being on fire if there are two or less remaining.
• Building materials no longer placeable in workshop or storage room to reduce player confusion (Colonists will automatically move surplus materials from the smelter to the shelves).
• The colonists will no longer present the player with any choices in the first few minutes of game play.
• Engine draw call optimisation.
• 32 bit exe updated.

I’ll be back soon with our next update in December. Here’s a rough roadmap of what to look forward to as we approach Beta and then release.

If you like these updates be sure to drop us feedback via Twitter and Steam reviews.

I had this on my mind, blocking my ability to work and needed write it down. This blog is only tangentially related to Maia and video games development, but might be an interesting read none the less. Feel free to ignore it, Maia 0.59 is out in about a week!

I’m sad to report to you that the world ended a decade ago.

I was working in simulations, engineering maritime systems at a British offshoot of a large Russian/Swedish corporation. Really amazing stuff for the time. Full scale functioning ship’s bridges set on hydraulics, giant screens projecting from server racks mounted with dozens of NVIDIA 8800GTXs.

I was the sole UK contractor, they needed someone who could work without communications barriers and time differences. More importantly they needed someone who had knowledge of the UK armed forces and could work with sensitive data that the MOD wanted to stay in the country.

One day we got a bug report from the Navy. They had loaded up the latest release with the newly released future tide data. Dover was under the sea. As were several parts of Southampton and other sites around the country.

I was tasked with debugging the error. I painstakingly went through the visual models comparing heights with OS and satellite data. There was no error. A high enough tide would in a few years encroach on a significant amount of the UK coast. The data I was working from was not partisan or trying to make a point. It was a fact of life the military were dealing with. The sea was rising and fast.

My next job was in Scotland, and again urgent. Sea defences were being overwhelmed at a certain site and were having to be reinforced. I had to update our visual models to show this. The work was being done in a hurry. The North Sea storms were stronger now, and more frequent than ever, critical infrastructure was at risk.

A few months later, in the dead of winter, I shipped out to work in Venice. The Italian Navy and cruise companies required a new simulator. Unfathomable amounts of money were being talked about. This was big.

Venice is a city built in a lagoon. It’s been there in several forms for almost two millennia – and it was about to change more than it ever had before.

Venice floods. The Venetians have dealt with this since the founding of the city but now it was different. Floods were happening more and more often, with dramatic results. The cruise ships visiting the city were becoming more of a danger as the shallow lagoon was no longer subduing the bow waves escaping from the dredged channels. Schedules were being torn up left and right to ensure they waited to travel at lower and lower tides.

The constant threat of catastrophic flooding had become too much and the Lagoon was to be sealed. Huge sea barriers were to be built to disconnect from the ocean. Miles upon miles of shorelines were to be raised and reinforced. This project which came to be known as MOSE, was dreamt up in the year of my birth, but had become more and more urgent during my lifetime. That urgency had now peaked.

As well as the detailed plans for this massive infrastructure project I was given almost infinite resources to capture the data needed to produce a visual model of Venice. With my translator, the head of the Venetian Naval school, and the Mayor of the city and several dozen bottles of Prosecco sparkling wine, we commandeered vessels all over the lagoon. I took over twenty thousand images of the coastline over several trips to the region.

I did a lot of work on the simulator, but eventually it started to interrupt my degree work at Bournemouth and I handed it off messily to the far more focused team in Sweden. I hear they did a top notch job of it.

The MOSE project is, I believe, mostly completed, which is for me very heartening. Losing the priceless historic city to the sea would have been a loss for all mankind. However, it is a small victory in a war we have sadly already lost. The apocalypse is here.

This last summer was the hottest since records begun. The last sixteen months have seen global temperatures at levels never seen before. You don’t have to believe 99% of the world’s scientists on this, you don’t have to believe the Pope, just buy a thermometer and go dip it in the sea. The spike in global temperature does not follow any natural trends, it is a sharp sudden jolt in the graph that clearly correlates against human industrial activity.

I spent these hottest months working on Maia from an orchard in Greece, and I witnessed the effects. The orchard owners produce honey and have thousands of beehives. This year however the heat had caused the flowers on most plants in the region to fail. The pollen the bees needed to perform their task never came. The bees had to be given bricks of dried pollen bought wholesale, an expensive and unsustainable compromise.

The few trees that survived the heat and did bring fruit had further issues. The temperature was causing the oranges and lemons to spoil on the trees. The seeds inside a lot of them had sprouted due to abnormal heat at night and unusual hormone levels in the trees. I’ve seen this before, but never to this degree. It was scary.

Back in the 90’s, as a little one, I booted up the demo a game on my RISC OS Acorn computer. It was called Global Effect. The soundtrack is still one of the best game soundtracks of all time in my book. The game was about simulating the planet. I spent a lot of time desperately planting trees on the edges of the deserts of a doomed world. I loved that game, and it in many ways inspired some of the mechanics and back story of Maia.

In 2011 I decided to make my own world simulator. A silly little experiment really, but I wanted to see what our modern climate models would look like in a game. The game wasn’t fun. I gave up. The model was hitting an odd edge case. When CO2 in the atmosphere hit 400ppm the planets being simulated would go into an irretrievable death spiral.

I did not realise that this was not a bug.

In September 2016, planet earth hit a high of 400ppm CO2 in the atmosphere.

If we are to survive, we need to treat this issue as the immediate threat it is. A change in temperature of a few degrees will render much of our arable land unusable, we will face a food crisis that will be unsolvable. We need to create a global cooperative effort to stop the change. We need to be building fusion reactors worldwide by 2020. We need terawatt hour grid level power storage solutions for renewables. All fracking and oil exploration needs to be wound down in this decade. To allow this opposition to new designs of low waste fission reactors being built must stop. All transport networks must be electrified. A carbon tax may or may not help, but it must be done with all of the above. Billions of dollars must be put into each of the above.

After that we need to do some seriously drastic things. Things that will be expensive, potentially unethical and even more politically difficult than the first step. If you’ve played Maia you might know where I am going here. We need to begin geoengineering, whilst we still have the economic ability.

We need to start spraying sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere. The fine particles will change the albedo of the planet to allow cooling. This will require every single space agency, airforce, environment agency and climate scientist on the planet working in unison to achieve. It sounds impossible but the alternative is the deaths of billions.

We then need to begin reforesting equatorial regions (temperate forests are less effective for carbon sequestration), building new (rain)forests and ecosystems and providing the people (mostly farmers) that this would displace with meaningful, dignified reparation for what it will take from them.

We need to do this now. The MOSE project, from it’s first political inception, took half a century to come to fruition.

We, realistically, have ten years.

Colonising a planet like Maia should be a grand goal for humanity. Not a necessity.