CreatingPersons

A "person" is a unique ship or fleet of ships that will occasionally appear at random. Each person has a customized ship and its own set of things it might say to the player. If the player kills a person, that person will never appear to that particular pilot again. The syntax for the definition of a person is:

person <name>
	frequency <frequency#>
	government <government>
	personality [<type>...]
		confusion <amount#>
		<type>...
		...
	system
		system [<name>...]
			<name>...
			...
		government [<name>...]
			<name>...
			...
		near <system> [[<minJumps#>] <maxJumps#>]
		...
	phrase
		word
			<text>
			...
		...
	ship <modelName> [<name>]
		{ship definition...}
	[ship]
		...

The various parts of a person definition are described below.

frequency <frequency#>

At random intervals, averaging once every 10 minutes, there is an opportunity for a person to be created. The game looks for every person who has not already appeared since the last time the player took off from a planet, and who has not been killed by the player. It picks a random person to create based on the relative frequencies of all available special persons, which default to 100 if no value is given. That is, a person with a frequency of 200 is twice as likely to appear as one with the default frequency of 100.

To reduce the rate of persons being created if there are not many of them, there is also a chance that no person will be created, and that chance has a frequency of 1000. So, for example, if there are only two persons in the game and they both have a frequency of 100, they each have a 100 / (100 * 2 + 1000) = 8.3% chance of appearing in a given ten-minute interval.

government <government>

This is the person's government. This can be a normal government, or a special one like "Author". But, there is only one "Parrot".

personality [<type>...]
	confusion <amount#>
	<type>...
	...

This defines the personality characteristics. The confusion value is generally not used, but it is meant to control how accurately a ship fires its weapons. (It defaults to 10, meaning the ship's aim may be off by up to 10 pixels.)

system
	system [<name>...]
		<name>...
		...
	government [<name>...]
		<name>...
		...
	near <system> [[<minJumps#>] <maxJumps#>]
	...

This defines a location filter for possible systems, using the same syntax as the source, destination, waypoint, and stopover filters in missions. For more details on location filters, see the location filter page. This controls which systems the person will appear in. For example, they might only appear in systems belonging to a certain government, or in a certain area.

phrase
	word
		<text>
		...
	...

This defines what the person says if you hail them, or at random intervals if they decide to hail you. The phrase should be a collection of one or more "words," each of which is chosen from one or more options. If you want different options, you can define more than one "phrase" that the person might use. (See the "hails.txt" data file for examples of how this works.)

ship <modelName> [<name>]
	{ship definition...}

This is a definition of the person's ship, using the same format as all other ship definitions. Starting in v. 0.9.9, multiple ships may be defined to create a person that is the leader of a fleet (such as in an interceptor squadron, or a carrier commanding a flotilla of fightercraft). The person is considered destroyed when the first ship in the list is either destroyed or captured - any escorts that did not survive are replaced when the person next spawns. Starting in v. 0.9.13, escorts are able to have their ship name specified, otherwise they will use the name of the person. The first ship in the list will always use the name of the person.