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Modder "fixes" Aliens: Colonial Marines AI by changing a SINGLE letter of .ini file typo


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23 minutes ago, Reputator said:

Holy shit.

 

What's amazing is they put work into making the AI function decently, one typo destroyed that work from being in the final game, and no one ever caught it.

I think it's safe to assume that this was present in the final gold master that was sent to MS/Sony for 360/PS3 certification.

 

We know that the platform holders' certification process only really checks to make sure the code doesn't brick the console and a few other things (achievements, etc.) so non-existent AI wouldn't be on their radar, but that also kinda/sorta means that Gearbox didn't actually play the game's gold master before sending it to the platform holders.

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They had to know the ai was fucked pre-launch. Imagine being the guy who knew this bug was happening, and as each day passes brings you closer to shipping you're just going mad trying to find the cause. Then five years later some dude on a message board points out the error. As tragically hilarious as all this is, that guy is probably pretty relieved to know the cause :lol:

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Thats exactly why I went the Hardware  fix route in IT  instead of the Software programmer.   I hated coding to a Tee in school for that simple reason.  100's of line of code to get something done and the simple thing as One letter or number wrong fucks up the whole process.   

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2 hours ago, TomCat said:

Thats exactly why I went the Hardware  fix route in IT  instead of the Software programmer.   I hated coding to a Tee in school for that simple reason.  100's of line of code to get something done and the simple thing as One letter or number wrong fucks up the whole process.   

Even in a super basic coding tutorial I did to make a little Breakout clone, you could double click on anything and it would highlight all instances of that term. If you started to type anything, if it matched existing terms, you could just select it from there, which always seemed faster than typing it outright, even for people like me who are quick typists.

 

lWTb90P.png

 

Did they just stop doing this? Were they in a huge rush? I imagine professional programming is a lot different than dinking around just to learn some basics, but I can't imagine not using incredibly helpful tools.

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1 hour ago, Xbob42 said:

Even in a super basic coding tutorial I did to make a little Breakout clone, you could double click on anything and it would highlight all instances of that term. If you started to type anything, if it matched existing terms, you could just select it from there, which always seemed faster than typing it outright, even for people like me who are quick typists.

 

lWTb90P.png

 

Did they just stop doing this? Were they in a huge rush? I imagine professional programming is a lot different than dinking around just to learn some basics, but I can't imagine not using incredibly helpful tools.

It's alot easier now from what I can tell when doing scripting  but back in the 90's  when I was taking basic programming the help wasnt easily avl back then  We were using Dos Prompts

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4 minutes ago, TomCat said:

It's alot easier now from what I can tell when doing scripting  but back in the 90's  when I was taking basic programming the help wasnt easily avl back then  We were using Dos Prompts

I wonder, are veteran coders still doing things the old fashioned way because that's how they learned? I know that's a massive issue in Japanese development, where senior devs would hoard techniques and stuff to stay relevant and not teach newcomers anything, but also wouldn't know modern techniques and I assume that's what lead to a lot of janky ass Steam ports, as one example.


Seems like keeping your skillset relevant would take some time and effort. Again, just as a guess from someone who has lightly brushed up against this, not actually worked in any dev environment.

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3 minutes ago, Xbob42 said:

I wonder, are veteran coders still doing things the old fashioned way because that's how they learned? I know that's a massive issue in Japanese development, where senior devs would hoard techniques and stuff to stay relevant and not teach newcomers anything, but also wouldn't know modern techniques and I assume that's what lead to a lot of janky ass Steam ports, as one example.


Seems like keeping your skillset relevant would take some time and effort. Again, just as a guess from someone who has lightly brushed up against this, not actually worked in any dev environment.

I belive that is also a big big factor.  I remember trying to get mac users to switch to Pc  When I was doing music.  They were so used to doing everything on the Mac they Refused to learn how to do in on a PC.  Same thing with Graphic Artists  They are stuck on thier MACs   even though Photoshop works equally well on a PC. People are just resistant to change but in the tech industry you have to cause things Change so fast and you have to keep up to stay employed

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On 7/14/2018 at 12:05 PM, Xbob42 said:

Even in a super basic coding tutorial I did to make a little Breakout clone, you could double click on anything and it would highlight all instances of that term. If you started to type anything, if it matched existing terms, you could just select it from there, which always seemed faster than typing it outright, even for people like me who are quick typists.

 

lWTb90P.png

 

 Did they just stop doing this? Were they in a huge rush? I imagine professional programming is a lot different than dinking around just to learn some basics, but I can't imagine not using incredibly helpful tools.

In most code files autocomplete can work because it's referencing something (like in that image) that is declared within that file itself, or it can pull from other files that are being explicitly referenced from the file being worked on.

 

Most .ini files don't really work that way. They're mostly just dumb text files that don't have any real code, they're just setting variables for runtime. There aren't references to the files where those variables are used, so there's no way that autocomplete (at least as I'm familiar with it in Visual Studio or Eclipse) would help with this particular bug.

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