Alien Colonial Marines was a mediocre game by all accounts and the AI was a noticeable mess in the game as the Aliens would do stupid stuff and sometimes would just get stuck. However, reportedly this mess with AI would have been avoided if not for a single-letter typo in the game’s code.
This is according to ModDB user jamesdickinson963, who explained in a recent post that a single typo exists in the game’s code.
While the typo is very small but the results it has yielded has made a mess of the AI in Alien Colonial Marines.
According to the modder, the typo exists in a single line of code in the game’s “.ini” file and players are able to fix the typo.
The typo is the unnecessary addition of the letter ‘a’ in the line of code that controls the behavior of the Alien AI in combat.
Inside your games config file (My Document\My Games\Aliens Colonial Marines\PecanGame\Config\PecanEngine.ini) is the following line of code :
ClassRemapping=PecanGame.PecanSeqAct_AttachXenoToTether -> PecanGame.PecanSeqAct_AttachPawnToTeather
Im sure you’ll notice the spelling mistake
ClassRemapping=PecanGame.PecanSeqAct_AttachXenoToTether -> PecanGame.PecanSeqAct_AttachPawnToTether
If you fix it to look like the above and then play the game, the difference is pretty crazy!
According to the modder, the results have been very clear after fixing the typo as the ALiens become much more aggressive during combat.
The reason why this typo impacted the AI behavior is that “AttachPawnToTether” is the line of code that controls “tactical position adjustment, patrolling and target zoning” and with the typo, this messes things up and the AI doesn’t know what to do in combat.
When a Xeno is spawned, it is attached to a zone tether. This zone tells the Xeno what area is its fighting space and where different exits are. In Combat, a Xeno will be forced to switch to a new tether (such as one behind you) so as to flank, or disperse so they aren’t so grouped up etc. (*disclaimer* this is inferred opinion, I cant see the actual code only bits)
However, reports have emerged that after fixing the typo the AI behavior improves significantly as PCGamer tested it out and noted that fixing the typo improves the Alien AI.
Alien Colonial Marines is a first-person shooter set in the Alien universe developed by Gearbox Software for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
Source: Resetera
