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I always have a soft spot for Maia, a colony building sim from Simon Roth of Machine Studios with its very different take on building up a space colony on a distant world.

Unlike RimWorld and other colony building games, Maia is more about looking pretty and providing some hard-science. It's a little difficult, in some ways a bit buggy but it always has such huge potential to be awesome. After a break, Roth is back to updating the game and this latest release is huge. One of the big additions is a new "ray-marched voxelised shadow system" which is pretty fancy and allows "every light in your base to cast accurate dynamic shadows into the world".

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Did you find it performing lower than expected before? It should be a lot smoother now too. Roth mentioned a deep optimization pass over the core game code and the graphics, resulting in "performance gains of up to 30-40% on a middle range CPU, which can lead to a much smoother frame rate".

There's plenty more changes including:

  • 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.

You can buy Maia on Steam and also itch.io.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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7 comments

Nezchan Jan 26, 2021
Every time this updates now my reaction is the same: "Wait, this wasn't abandoned?"
herrorange Jan 26, 2021
I also was so surprised to see some action, unfortunately it's still such a mess to make progress and not having everyone die of hunger. Save & Load still helps and some things did get better. That said, I also have a soft spot for that gave as I was one of the early adopters and you don't get those type of games anymore (I do not tolerate simplicity of graphics and Indy-style games). Still managed to kill few hours over this weekend :)
HerrLange Jan 26, 2021
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Woho it's alive..
Nezchan Jan 26, 2021
I was an early adopter on this one too, and I even liked some of the early builds (before you could take direct control of the android, and you were limited to one). But as time went on, I was less motivated to come back to it given that people continued to report problems. Not sure I'll try it now, we'll see.
beko Jan 26, 2021
Quoting: NezchanEvery time this updates now my reaction is the same: "Wait, this wasn't abandoned?"
Ah… what gave you that impression? Dev is active on Twitter and on the Discord channel of Maia all the time 🤔
Nezchan Jan 27, 2021
Quoting: beko
Quoting: NezchanEvery time this updates now my reaction is the same: "Wait, this wasn't abandoned?"
Ah… what gave you that impression? Dev is active on Twitter and on the Discord channel of Maia all the time 🤔

Neither of which I've been following.
beko Jan 27, 2021
Quoting: Nezchan
Quoting: beko
Quoting: NezchanEvery time this updates now my reaction is the same: "Wait, this wasn't abandoned?"
Ah… what gave you that impression? Dev is active on Twitter and on the Discord channel of Maia all the time 🤔

Neither of which I've been following.
Well, I guess you do have a point. I remember mentioning this to the dev already years ago because the website doesn't suggest the appropriate news channels for the game at all. So yes, it really does look abandoned on first glance 🤔
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