News

You can significantly overhaul the AI in Aliens: Colonial Marines by simply deleting one letter

10 Comments

Aliens: Colonial Marines was criticized by a lot of gamers for its mediocre AI for the xenomorphs. We’ve seen countless of GIFs with the aliens acting really stupid, and it was one of the – many – reasons that gamers despised that Aliens game. However, what if I told you that you can significantly overhaul the AI by simply deleting one letter in your .INI configuration file?

Seems impossible, right? However, that’s exactly what modder ‘jamesdickinson963’ discovered. For some unknown reason, the AI routine for xenomorph is spelled incorrectly in the game’s configuration file and by fixing you can make the aliens behave in a more sensible and clever way.

As the modder claimed:

“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 zoning

When 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)”

Now as you may notice, this trick was discovered back in 2017 however it completely passed under our radar. The last time we reported about the Aliens: Colonial Marines Overhaul mod was back in October 2017 and this trick was discovered in November 2017.

I’m also pretty sure that there aren’t a lot of gamers playing Aliens: Colonial Marines these days. Still, those interested in it can at least enjoy a better AI than what most of us experienced when we played it.

I also suggest using our SweetFX mod for Aliens: Colonial Marines that makes the game look a bit closer to the Alien/Aliens movies and the older Aliens vs Predator games.