Aliens: Colonial Marine's AI fixed by changing ONE LETTER.

[Nihilist74]

Fanatical has it for 2.99$. It was 29.99$ on steam and humble bundle.
https://www.fanatical.com/en/game/al...nes-collection

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Console players can't do anything to fix it.

Watch there be a rush on Steam to buy it now.

I actually kind of want it now, always enjoyed games like this and previous entries in the series.

I was curious to see how much they were charging for it on steam and other sites. Steam and humble bundle had it for 29.99$. On fanatical, they had it for 2.99$.
https://www.fanatical.com/en/game/al...nes-collection

[Byleth]

It's really easy to make a simple typo and once it's in their all those lines of code make it hard to find.

I'm going to assume your grammar typo was on purpose, because that makes this statement very witty indeed

[MrPaladinGuy]

I was curious to see how much they were charging for it on steam and other sites. Steam and humble bundle had it for 29.99$. On fanatical, they had it for 2.99$.
https://www.fanatical.com/en/game/al...nes-collection

I did the same, and thanks.. I just bought it.

$3 is a steal.

All the DLC on Steam is $29.99...each....

[Cosmic Janitor]

How does something like this fly under the radar from both the coders doing the AI and modders?

Probably because the tools don't find this shit on their own. If you type something like that in code your compiler will usually yell at you that you just typed rubbish that can't be parsed. If you set up an .ini file or some other text based settings mechanism you rely on the interface that parses this to tell you that you just input garbage or the system autocorrects with a default.

[Daedius]

I wouldn't think typos in the code is something most modders think about looking for.

Don't even know how they can do that when coding software points you to such errors and highlights it with a red swiggly line when it can't find a correlation.

[Puupi]

Don't they have debug tools to find typos?! It should instantly inform if there is an invalid command....

[CasualNoob]

Enjoy our dynamic typing

[Radio]

With configuration files, you'll find that they're set up on a per-environment basis. So files like that could have permutations for:
- Local Dev
- Build Server
- Test Server
- Deployment/Publishing

Someone at some stage fucked up the Deployment package's config with said typo, but they never caught it elsewhere because the "lower environments" were properly set and the process that kept producing the typo was probably set up in their build pipeline, AKA automated. Couple that with .ini parsers being quite flexible (meaning that errors are just read as incorrect input or are just taken as-is) and the error only occurring on the user-side and you have something that flies under the radar for as long as it did.

To top it off, they probably just moved onto their next game and didn't give Aliens the post-release support needed to actually troubleshoot this shit.

[Keile]

I wouldn't call it fixed... It's better but they are still pretty derpy.

It's fixed in the sense that it is now working the way they intended it to.

Doesn't mean its GOOD AI. Just...working as intended.

[Nihilist74]

I did the same, and thanks.. I just bought it.

$3 is a steal.

All the DLC on Steam is $29.99...each....

Yah me too. Had to give it a shot at that low of a price.

[Kuntantee]

Hard to believe. This can not be a typo. When programmers parse/read some external data which corresponds to an abstraction in the code base, they need to convert the string (or whatever) to corresponding abstraction. This is a trivial task but as any other parts, it is prone to error. However, any programmer with an IQ above 80 would log or better assert in case there is a mismatch between expectation and what is being read/parsed.

If you spent hours debugging a parse problem, or let alone pass this shit to production code, you are a shit programmer.

[Deleted]

So...Gearbox is not just dishonest as fuck, but they're incompetent? I know they farmed this out to a third party developer, but holy shit...that change alone would have easily given the game another 5-10 points on Metacritic reviews and reduced the tsunami of shit that Gearbox got for this disaster of a game.

Didn't they farm this out to 5-6 third parties and that's one of the reasons it's an incomprehensible mess?

[Keile]

Didn't they farm this out to 5-6 third parties and that's one of the reasons it's an incomprehensible mess?

Yeah, like 5 developers worked on this. Which is why the game is just....a complete mess.

[notanmmmonewbie]

It's really easy to make a simple typo and once it's in their all those lines of code make it hard to find.

once it's in there*

[stellvia]

It's also kinda odd that something like the AI would be based on a text file you could edit easily...

[Val the Moofia Boss]

How does something like this fly under the radar from both the coders doing the AI and modders?

It's actually incredibly easy to misread your code and then go "WTH why isn't it working", go back and strenuously reread your code, and still pass over a typo.

[Edge-]

https://gearboxsoftware.bamboohr.com...iew.php?id=117

And Gearbox is trying to be cheeky about this...which comes off to me as incredibly shitty in light of how much of a disaster that game was an how thoroughly Pitchford lied through his teeth leading up to launch.

[The Stormbringer]

Is there a video showing the difference before and after fixing the problem?

[kail]

From what I remembered in that game's reviews, broken AI is one of the many problems that exist.

[Edge-]

Is there a video showing the difference before and after fixing the problem?

PC Gamer link in the OP. It's not always major, but it's definitely noticable in the side-by-sides they have in their piece.