You did a real good job there, Randy.
Aliens: Colonial Marines has long been considered to be a… not good game. And part of the reason would be the dumbass enemy AI, for the Xenomorphs in particular. And, at least part of that may be down to a single letter typo.
As explained by jamesdickinson963 over on ModDB, a line of code in one of the .INI files has a simple typo.
Inside your games config file (My Document\My Games\Aliens Colonial Marines\PecanGame\Config\PecanEngine.ini) is the following line of code :
ClassRemapping=PecanGame.PecanSeqAct_AttachXenoToTether -> PecanGame.PecanSeqAct_AttachPawnToTeather
Im sure you’ll notice the spelling mistake
ClassRemapping=PecanGame.PecanSeqAct_AttachXenoToTether -> PecanGame.PecanSeqAct_AttachPawnToTether
If you fix it to look like the above and then play the game, the difference is pretty crazy!
Why is this line important? There are two reasons :
1) AttachXenoToTether doesn’t do anything. Its basically empty or stripped
2) AttachPawnToTether does ALOT. It controls tactical position adjustment, patrolling and target zoningWhen 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. (*disclaimer* this is inferred opinion, I cant see the actual code only bits)
Whenever the game tried to do this, nothing happened. Now it does!
And you might think that fixing that typo would do the trick. And for the most part, you’d be right. Fixing that eliminates a lot of the stupid shit the Xenomorphs would do in combat. Like running away. And standing there like idiots.
Granted, they’re still kinda dumb. But after the fix, they move more aggressively, and spend less time as a stationary target. Is it enough to boost the game out of its general placement? No; but if you own it, it’s worth a shot, right?