Colony building sim Maia surprises with a big feature release, gets ray-marched shadows

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.