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from the shoulda-used-better-AI-to-test-the-AI dept.
A years-old, one-letter typo led to Aliens: Colonial Marines' weird AI
History may never be kind to Aliens: Colonial Marines, but the present tense isn't looking so good for the lawsuit- and complaint-ridden Gearbox game, either. This week brought to our attention one of the weirdest coding typos we've ever seen in a game—which has apparently been hidden inside of A:CM's PC version since its 2013 launch.
[...] Upon researching [the game's fan-made patch] patch, ResetERA readers noticed something in the moddb.com notes that somehow escaped the gaming community at large in October 2017: the discovery of a one-letter typo in A:CM's INI files. As moddb.com user jamesdickinson963 pointed out last year, the game's "PecanEngine.ini" file references a "tether" system in assigning AI commands to the series' infamous monsters (which I'll call "xenomorphs" for brevity's sake, even though that term isn't necessarily the right one). However, one of its two mentions of the term "tether" is misspelled as "teather."
Dickinson's post alleges that this command, when spelled correctly, "controls tactical position adjustment, patrolling, and target zoning. 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." Thanks to how the engine parsed this typo, it never caused any crashes; instead, the engine ignored the unfamiliar term. Thus, the game's monsters never received the smarter, useful information that had been programmed from the get-go. Instead, they often ran around like in the below, infamous image. [Image]
From the comments:
I can kinda see QA missing it, since the AI is nondeterministic, it'd be hard get a bug created to say "the AI seems... bad"
![[Image]](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/giphy.gif){kind=link}
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ledow on Sunday July 15 2018, @11:24AM (2 children)
So they wrote a poor parser, which didn't warn about non-existent variables, or they didn't even bother to check the warnings from said parser before shipping, then didn't notice it in all the post-release debacle, never bothered patch it etc. etc. etc.
Whatever way you look at it, it's their fault, they pushed out a title before it was ready (a highly-anticipated and big-name title that could literally have restarted the movie->game genres), and they had code practices that didn't even spot what is a glaringly obvious error to any parser written with any kind of sense (and they wrote or used such a parser knowing that!).
It's not a question of a bug report that says "the AI is bad". ONE SINGLE PLAYTHROUGH tells you that you need to drastically re-do the AI, that there's something so terribly wrong (even if "programmed" correctly) that it's no good for a big-name game. It's not a "big", it's a "QA" report. "This is crap, and horrible for the player."
I'm finding it really hard to have sympathy, especially when they dropped the price of the game SO QUICKLY after launch. It wasn't just a typo in the way of bad AI that killed the game, it was a wholesale flop on many levels. They knew that.
a) I'm a MAD Aliens fan, I hate all the stuff that came after, and I've been crowing for years about wanting an Alien games with the real actors, weapons noises, etc. Literally, decades of wanting that game.
b) Yes, I bought it. When it was literally $5. And supposedly "patched". I wasn't going to touch it at all after reading the very first, post-release, non-embargoed review, and I would never have bought it before that.
c) I played it, got to a "barricade" scenario bit where your guys are trying to open the door, and you're in a big warehouse and aliens just keep coming. I literally uninstalled it an hour later without making much progress from there.
The AI on the aliens was shit. But the AI on your teammates was even worse. I'd often turn around and they're all dead despite being in an enclave where nothing could get through, or just standing there like idiots watching their teammates die. They didn't move, they didn't shoot back, it was awful, you were basically on your own. Someone released the mod that supposedly makes the best of the game, and I watched a video and couldn't even bring myself to try that either.
Then they did the Alien:Isolation, and I couldn't stand that either. They shat on the franchise when they could have reinvented the whole thing. How great would Alien games be in full VR? That's something I'd buy a setup for. But they're no good.
That a bug passed through and affected the AI? That's not the full story. That bug was there because nobody cared that the game was crap and unplayable, and the developers didn't bother to do the most cursory of automated checks on their code. Otherwise it would have been patched before release.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 15 2018, @05:05PM
I remembered that Atari Jaguar had VR headgear and Alien VS predator game. I actually saw the Jaguar with the AVP game in a gameshow once when i was a kid. Didn't get to play it. But apparently the VR gear was just a prototype and it was never released and AVP did not work with it anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 15 2018, @08:16PM
No body writes ini parers anymore. Any good settings library will provide an option for a default value if the settings key isn't found. I haven't seen any of them log a message when they fallback to the default value. At least some minor thought went into the programming it if didn't crash without an AI manager. That sort-of implies they had/have multiple AI managers.