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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, Insightful) by kaganar on Sunday July 15 2018, @01:37AM (2 children)
You're speaking as if this is a one or two person team. Of course the designers/implementers play-tested their work -- they probably did so throughout the lifetime of the product. However, somewhere along the way someone introduced a typo, it didn't get caught due to deadline or process constraints, and the result was poor consumer-facing AI. The problem wasn't the designers or devs -- it was systemic.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday July 15 2018, @02:11AM (1 child)
Precision of language: play-tested the shipping product.
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 15 2018, @04:38AM
If they were play-testing it for months in order to locate obvious bugs during development, do you honestly think the devs would want to continue playing it longer than they absolutely had to once it was out the door?