A dude resource can be thought of as a container for ships that share certain characteristics. Any ship of a given dude class will have that dude class's AI type and governmental affiliation, and will yeild the same types of booty when boarded. In a dude resource, up to four different ship classes can be pointed to, with a probability set for each ship class. The result of all this is that, in other parts of EV's data file, you can point to a dude class and know that EV will create a ship of the proper AI type and governmental alignment, and will pick the new ship's type based on the probabilities you set in the dude resource. The dude resource's fields are:
AIType Which type of AI to use for ships of this dude class (see below)
ShipTypes (x4) These fields contain the ID numbers of up to four different ship classes
% Prob (x4) These fields set the probability that a ship of this dude class will be of a certain ship type
Govt The ID number of the dude class's government, or -1 for independent.
Booty Flags that define what you'll get when you board a ship of this dude class. (see below)
The five different AI types are:
1 - Wimpy Trader Visits planets and runs away when attacked
2 - Brave Trader Visits planets and fights back when attacked, but runs away when his attacker is out of range
3 - Warship Seeks out and attacks his enemies, or jumps out if there aren't any.
4 - Interceptor Seeks out his enemies, or parks in orbit around a planet if he can't find any. Buzzes incoming ships to scan them for illegal cargo. Also acts as "piracy police" by attacking any ship that fires on or attempts to board another, non-enemy ship while the interceptor is watching.
5 - Naval Fighter Carried by another ship. Reserved for internal use - do not use!
6 - Escort Flies with the player. Reserved for internal use - do not use!
You can set different combinations of booty to be had from ships of a certain dude class by ORing different bits into the dude's Booty field. If a dude class has a booty flag of 0x0000, then you can't get anything from the ship, and you're told that you were "repelled while attempting to board" it. The different booty flags are:
0x0001 Food
0x0002 Industrial goods
0x0004 Medical supplies
0x0008 Luxury goods
0x0010 Metal
0x0020 Equipment
0x0040 Money (depends on the ship's purchase price)
The last field tells EV what kind of text to display when you hail a ship of this dude type and send a greeting: (note that these values can be added together to have EV display multiple different types of information)
InfoTypes What kind of info to display
1000 Good prices
2000 Disaster info
4xxx Specific advice (the last three digits of this value are added to 7500 to get the ID of the STR# resource from which to get the quote)
One thing to remember when setting up a dude resource is that EV will choke if any of the ShipType fields are filled incorrectly (i.e. less that 128 or greater than 159) or any of the probabilities are not between 1 and 100. Therefore, if you want a dude type to point to only one ship class, you'd set all four ShipType fields the same and put 25% in each Prob field. (see the "Confed Liner Only" dude class for an example of this)
