Aliens: Colonial Marines AI was dumb because of a typo

[Ttaskmaster]

Wasn't the game made by gearbox? I remember hearing at the time, that gearbox used money sega gave them on borderlands 2 development instead.

There were several mini-scandals during dev.
Rebellion were invited by SEGA to submit something for another AVP, achieved more in six weeks than Gearbox did in many times more months, were subsequently granted the contract, did the game, it got released, it hit the charts, everyone played it for a bit.... and it was long forgotten, before Gearbox even finished A:CM.

[AGTDenton]

I don't.

1. They released it like that, clearly no concern for QA
2. How long has it taken to identify and fix? 4 Years and it was fixed by a member of the community, not the developer


This is a shining example of whats wrong with the industry currently.

Completely agree, the fact it was such a fundamental part to the game there are no excuses to lack of QC/QA.
They don't seem to realise it isn't just 1 game that is affected it damages the industry as a whole.

Wasn't the game made by gearbox? I remember hearing at the time, that gearbox used money sega gave them on borderlands 2 development instead.

Yes Gearbox were having an extremely bad period, they outsourced development of this game as well as shafting Sega. It's amazing it actually saw the light of day.
https://www.destructoid.com/develope...s-245986.phtml

I'm guessing Sega has now lost the Aliens licence as a result.

[ik9000]

that is shocking. You'd think what was meant to be an AA title would have had more thorough scrutiny when it wasn't performing rightly. It's as dumb as the old LOTR BFME2 ini fixes to get it to show the map height correctly on high-res screens that EA refused to release even though everyone in the community was already using them. Just doesn't make sense

[scaryjim]

It sounds like the code was probably working fine, it'll pass it's unit tests. The issue seemed to have been a bad (but not broken) configuration file. ...

AFAICT the config line binds a behaviour to a function. If the function it's trying to bind to doesn't exist, it should be throwing errors all over the place: either when the binding is attempted, or every time that function is called. if it's swallowing the error silently, then the problem is in the code.

Of course, that does leave a second possibility - that the typoed function name *does* exist, and operates in such a way that the observed behaviour is intentional - not for public consumption perhaps, but for some internal (testing?) purpose. And the game simply got shipped with a testing config instead of a production one. Although that would beg the question: who on earth names a testing function quite so obscurely?!