This is not going to make it a significantly better game. It has lots of issues.
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Aliens: Colonial Marines AI fixed by a single letter
- Thread starter JigglesBunny
- Start date
This is not going to make it a significantly better game. It has lots of issues.
I don't know if it was like this but imagine if they knew something was up, that the AI behavior was certainly not what they intended... Man, the people who went over the code with a fine toothed comb up till deadline all eyes on them feeling like the success of the entire project was their shoulders... The waterfall of feelings they must be experiencing right now.
And then the guy/s responsible for the .ini…
To be a fly on those walls.
Wonder how those txt messages are going down...
And then the guy/s responsible for the .ini…
To be a fly on those walls.
Wonder how those txt messages are going down...
Wow. Amazing sweeping generalisation. You need to find a better quality of colleagues.
How!?
Surely someone would have noticed the AI acting nothing like the vertical slice they showed and looked into fixing it, or were there so many other bugs that the AI became low priority to fix.
I can't believe. there was such a simple solution to one of the games biggest problems.
Surely someone would have noticed the AI acting nothing like the vertical slice they showed and looked into fixing it, or were there so many other bugs that the AI became low priority to fix.
I can't believe. there was such a simple solution to one of the games biggest problems.
There are a lot of people shitting on Gearbox in this thread. For the record, they have made some damn fine games as a company. In an alternate world, ACM might have been as outstanding as their Brothers in Arms titles. It's a shame ACM was such a mess. It's a shame Randy chose to be all weird and dishonest about it. It's also nice to see people working to fix the game's many problems, although I'm not entirely keen on some of the changes modders tend to push such as making facehuggers way harder.
God no, unless the true ai is the successor to Fear we've been waiting for all these years it was an ugly, repetitive nothing of a game back when it released let alone now. The story is also an abomination.
I'm still disgusted by literally all preview and trailer gameplay, including footage shown days before being release, being fake and nothing resembling the game. Me and my friend were shocked when it unlocked at midnight.
It would really surprise me that an engineer wouldn't be able to debug that when noticeable bugs were happening. Outside of ineptitude, only thing I could think of is that fixing it was too costly on the CPU side with the AI... it was 5 years ago, so maybe it was tanking framerate. Would be interesting to test it on an older PC to see.
This definitely wasn't done intentionally. Nor was it intentionally not-fixed.
Well you can't exactly run spell check on it!
The person who made the typo went on to write the information on Capcom box arts.
You're assuming the people who did the AI were even still there at the end. Don't forget all the shadiness that went into this game's development. Sega thought Gearbox were making it and meanwhile Gearbox were farming it out left right and centre. It could be that TimeGate did the bulk of the AI and then Gearbox finished it without properly understanding the code and that it was supposed to work better.
Depends on the project and the team. At my current gig I work on a large number of projects with short turn around times so I'm bouncing between games constantly so the majority of my testing is more surface-level. At prior companies though I've worked on a single project for several years at a time. In those longer-term projects I was able to become more familiar with what was under the hood and able to tinker and apply that knowledge in my test casing, for some testers and projects this might include messing with INI files. On one such Unity project I became so comfortable working on the game in my free time that I was able to spin off into a dedicated systems design role out of QA.
It probably went into QA with a name like GenericName_0x000001DEAD00BEAF (with a typo) and at the very end before final assembly decided to rename stuff by hand but made a mistake... xD
It's very funny to read , they cannot say there's nothing wrong with the AI now :)
The actual development issue here isn't that there was a typo. Typos happen, and have to be expected.
The actual issue is that there is no part of the game or toolchain which prominently reports that a typo happened -- i.e. that a mapping to a non-existent element occurred. It would be different if the typo changed it to something which exists but is wrong -- I could understand that being hard to catch -- but I'd consider a non-existent element flying under the radar at load time the real underlying bug here.
The actual issue is that there is no part of the game or toolchain which prominently reports that a typo happened -- i.e. that a mapping to a non-existent element occurred. It would be different if the typo changed it to something which exists but is wrong -- I could understand that being hard to catch -- but I'd consider a non-existent element flying under the radar at load time the real underlying bug here.
QA doesn't check the code, they have no need to go over the config file. The question for me, as someone already pointed out, is why did the compiler not pick up on the seemingly undeclarated object.
Not go over the code, but behaviours(ai) should be expected and if they see something off/weird, they should escalate/ask. But I guess it could be possible that it was dismissed as "this is what it is supposed to be".
Yeah totally. It seems like this was a rushed project as it was, it's more than likely that regression testing wasn't a priority or QA simply weren't given the resources to go deep near the end of the project.
So imagine being one of the developers responsible for the AI code and seeing the final product.
Man that must be a headscratcher.
It still kinda blows my mind how [apparantly?] no one noticed a huge chunck of AI patterns/behaviour was straight up not functioning.
Man that must be a headscratcher.
It still kinda blows my mind how [apparantly?] no one noticed a huge chunck of AI patterns/behaviour was straight up not functioning.
Good catch.
Has anyone corrected this too and seen how it affects the game? Anton, do you know what it affects?
Has Anton found another undiscovered error here that changes the gameplay?
It's been previously found and tested a little according to the comments on the original discovery (scroll down), and again it allegedly helps.
Which coincidentally is what I came here to ask; has anyone done a comparison with the other typo fix alone, then both combined vs the base game?
This kind of sucks. It took five whole years for anyone to discover this in a plain text file which is commonly poked about in. Once you know the solution it seems easy, but the fact that it's taken so long and god knows how many people skimming over it for years... perspective.
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People saying 'surely somebody in company had to notice bad AI behavior' thats not exactly true.
The game could be tested internally with the correct .ini file and only the .ini that was linked to the client build was messed up.
That said, testing of final client build should also be part of QA process and should be noticed, even if not before launch, at least after launch.
So Gearbox knew definitely something was wrong with AI, unless they changed their whole QA department, after release by looking up players gameplay videos.
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I also do not know how often in Game development the CI with extensive test automation is linked.
The game could be tested internally with the correct .ini file and only the .ini that was linked to the client build was messed up.
That said, testing of final client build should also be part of QA process and should be noticed, even if not before launch, at least after launch.
So Gearbox knew definitely something was wrong with AI, unless they changed their whole QA department, after release by looking up players gameplay videos.
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Yes, it should be part of test automation process, but maybe it was only for development builds, not client builds.
I also do not know how often in Game development the CI with extensive test automation is linked.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was being reported but the rest of the game was spewing out so many errors and warnings that it was ignored.
Its very limited popularity means the files may not have been poked around in all that much over the years.