The AI of Aliens: Colonial Marines Was Terrible Because of a Single Typo

Jul. 16, 2018

Apparently, the enemies in the game weren’t really a challenge, and seemed to not have the ability to work as a team to surprise the player, or to do anything other than walk into the line of fire to die rather easily.

However,Jamesdickinson963 of ModDB, who has been working on improving the game, has discovered a typo in the game’s code that may be (at least partly) to blame for the terrible AI exhibited in the game. According to his findings, one of the game’s INI filesmisspelled “tether” as “teather”and hence didn’t get executed at all. According to him, correcting the spelling back to “tether” improves the game’s AI performance by a considerable amount.

If you’re interested in checking this out for yourself, the line to change is

ClassRemapping=PecanGame.PecanSeqAct_AttachXenoToTether -> PecanGame.PecanSeqAct_AttachPawnToTeather

You’ll have tochange “Teather” to “Tether”as shown below:

ClassRemapping=PecanGame.PecanSeqAct_AttachXenoToTether -> PecanGame.PecanSeqAct_AttachPawnToTether

This line can be found in the PecanEngine.ini file that will be located in “My Documents\My Games\Aliens Colonial Marines\PecanGame\Config\PecanEngine.ini” or somewhere similar based on where you installed the game.

So try it out if you want to, and let us know if you noticed any observable difference in the game.