icemann on 16/7/2018 at 13:58
As an update to my above post, I just went into the game which created the folders under My Documents\My Games\Aliens Colonial Marines\PecanGame\Config and I checked the .ini file and it still has the typo in there. So if you play this game in future, be sure to go in to fix this to ensure proper Alien AI at work.
icemann on 16/7/2018 at 18:24
So you'll have to excuse me double and maybe later triple posting, but now with the AI stuff for the aliens fixed, I figured I'd give this game a try.
Played it for the past 4 hours.
So. This game oozes atmosphere. You turn the lights out in your room and play this with the sound WAY UP, and it REALLY pulls you in. I love that. Weapons all sound authentic. Some great atmospheric music in the background that is very Aliens. The alien AI from my observations has been excellent. I'm assuming that ini file editing fixed all the stuff I'd seen in review videos ages ago, as I've not spotted any of that stuff in the 4 hours I've been playing.
With the alien AI fixed, this game could be fantastic if they released the source code to allow fans to fix the remaining stuff. What could use fixing (some of it is quite laughable):
* Bounding zones around the meshes of NPCs is needed. In quite a few sections of the game, I was able to walk through friendly NPCs and yet not others. So this says to me that someone forgot to add them.
* If you ignore what the NPCs tell you to do and just wander around, despite the "zomg emergency" music at play, there's no penalty at all. It's very much a "Don't look at the guy behind the curtain" element to the game, cause if you just do your own thing nothing happens to you. Your all good. Put more stuff in if the player decides to just fuck around. It gives off that feeling where your a kid playing a game with your friends, and you have to stick to the game and take it seriously otherwise it breaks the experience. Same thing in this game. If you ignore NPC instructions it breaks the game experience as there is no consequence for doing so.
* Whilst with the ini file fix it completely gets rid of the major issues with the aliens, they still zone in on you wayyyyy too much and completely ignore the other marines. This doesn't always happen, but enough to be noticeable. And when it does, the marines tend to ignore the aliens running at you so that would need fixing too.
* There is one bit where your supposed to flick some switches in-order to leave a certain place, whilst being shot at by Weyland Mercs. If you just take your sweet ass time and casually walk from point to point, NO'ONE SHOOTS AT YOU. There's no penalty. Immersion breaker. Have the Weyland guys actually friggin shoot at you. Make it a tense bit in the game.
* The marines you travel with are invincible. It's very obvious in-game. Complete immersion breaker. I often just walked off when they'd be shooting at enemies to go look for dog tags and audio logs. Have it be that they get knocked out for a period of time if you don't assist them.
Beyond that, the games fine now. Despite the issues I've been really enjoying the game. I'm now in Hadley's Hope and man is it great to actually get to go there in an aliens FPS. It all just looks great and authentic. Major attention to detail. Walking through areas with the motion tracker, gunning down xenos. I'm having an absolute blast with this game, and I DID NOT expect that AT ALL. I was expecting complete crap. What I got is really good, whilst being completely broken in a couple of areas.
This is the sort of thing, that (with the ini fix) they could have fixed if they had put a few more months into this, and the majority of it would have been fixed up. Now with that said, I'm playing a game released back in 2013. 5 years ago. So it's very likely that a heap of stuff already was fixed before I got around to playing this. But I can only judge it from what I see now. And what I'm seeing is good. Buggy but good.
As a games dev myself (and nothing near the level of the people who worked on this game) I have a funny feeling that that Alien AI typo in the ini file crept in at some point in the development, but they just never noticed it as they were too busy doing other stuff. Then they realized about the buggy AI and got stuck trying to find the source of it. Much like if you have a logic error in your game code, where you spend hours/days/weeks/months trying to find it and it's usually a single wrong digit somewhere. In this case it wasn't even in their game code anywhere, but in a friggin ini file. So they'd have been doing various attempts code wise to fix it, but the behavior would always persist as they were looking in the wrong place. That's my guess at what happened. And since they spent so long trying (and failing) to fix that, they never fixed the other stuff.
And this is why you KEEP BACKUPS. Fuck. Even I know that. If something works in version A, but not by version C, you compare what changed between the 2 points to find the source. Though if the typo was there from day 1 then fine that'd be really hard to track down.
Harvester on 16/7/2018 at 21:05
Interesting write-up about the game, icemann!
I agree that such bugs can be hard to track down, but they could've set up their development environment so that it would've given an error such as 'AttachXenoToTeather - no such function exists - PecanEngine.ini line 484'. Configuring your development environment to show errors like that (and maybe even refuse to run when such an error is present) is always a smart idea and can prevent a lot of unnecessary and tedious bug-tracking.
icemann on 16/7/2018 at 23:42
Completely agree. Better compilation tools = better, bug free game. Or less buggy.
Pyrian on 17/7/2018 at 05:38
I wonder if the oversight had something to do with all that outsourcing they did with it? Maybe there were hundreds or even thousands of warnings flying around, most of them irrelevant, and the people who understood and could've easily fixed the problem were no longer involved.
Starker on 18/7/2018 at 00:12
Why are all the articles talking about this like it was just discovered? It's been known since last November at least. So bizarre.
Edit: well, at least RPS has changed their story to better reflect it. Kudos to them, I suppose.
Shadowcat on 18/7/2018 at 11:16
Quote Posted by icemann
And this is why you KEEP BACKUPS. Fuck. Even I know that. If something works in version A, but not by version C, you compare what changed between the 2 points to find the source.
Yeah, if professional software developers aren't using version control, they're bad developers. A modern VCS has in-built support for rapidly isolating the change that caused a problem, if you can provide it with any arbitrary pair of "good" and "bad" revisions, and you have some way of testing for the problem (which might just be "compiling and playing the game" in this instance). Or even if your VCS doesn't streamline the process, you can easily do the same thing manually -- it's just a matter of repeatedly bisecting the remaining problem space, and keeping track of the good and bad revisions. Ultimately it still requires someone to spot the bug; but even with poor commit practices it will in most cases
dramatically narrow down the scope of the problem.
I would speculate along the same lines as Pyrian -- someone could have tracked this down with relative ease (e.g. the programmer who had implemented some decent A.I. in the first place and would recognise its presence or absence), but perhaps the people who would have realised that a terrible regression had occurred were no longer involved in the project.
icemann on 18/7/2018 at 17:46
Hmm. Just finished off this game.
The last 2 missions are a mixed bag. When it's all out open warfare - Great, when your in the xeno hive areas - Great, final battle with the Queen - meh too easy and no challenge at all. Very predictable also. Why does every Aliens game have to end with that? Grrr.
It all ends really average with the final cinematic being very unsatisfying and leaving many questions unanswered. How the fuck did Hicks get back? Who went down to the prison planet then?. His excuse for that is equally as bad as Arnie's "Judgement Day is inevitable" excuse reason for SKYNET coming back in Terminator 3.
So overall:
This game is a mixture of excellent - fantastic bits, with bad - average bits. Some parts are REALLY hard, whilst others are stupid easy. Best bits in game - Hadley's Hope. Get there and every bit there is excellent - fantastic. The start is pretty damn good as well. Atmosphere, music, plot, level design = excellent. Scripting = Mixed (even with the ini fix), as you can tell that they programmed the aliens and some of the Weyland Mercs to only be kill-able by the player. Quite noticeable. Friendly marines (the key plot ones) being invincible is another negative. Game needs a better difficulty curve as it seems to get easier with each successive bit after Hadley's. That the marines don't have collision boxes is just poor.
Game really needed more bits where it's just you moving through a level, as where it does that the game is excellent. I found myself using the motion tracker A LOT in this game.
So a real mixed bag. I still REALLY enjoyed this in many of the sections and it's certainly worth playing. But it's not a great game. Just a good one in need of some MAJOR TLC.
6/10. If it wasn't for the starting section + Hadley's it'd be a 5 or lower.
Better than AvP? Hell no.
Easter eggs found that got a smile out of me - Newt's doll's head, a red laser search probe from Prometheus.
