ShipPersonalities - Fzzr/endless-sky GitHub Wiki

Each ship in the game can have a variety of "personality" flags that control its behavior. This can be used, for example, to make one ship that goes out of its way to join fights, and another that will desert its friends if the fight starts to turn against it. A ship can have any number of personality flags set, although some combinations may not make sense.

Flags that control who a ship attacks:

• pacifist: will not attack under any circumstances.
• forbearing: will not attack unless its shields are reduced to below 90%.
• timid: does not join other people's fights; only attacks targets that are nearby and targeting it.
• heroic: will fight even if badly damaged or outgunned, and will attack targets even if they are far away.
• nemesis: only attacks the player's ships.

Flags that control how a ship attacks:

• frugal: does not expend ammunition unless it has lost more than 50% of its shields or its government is outnumbered in the current system.
• disables: tries to disable enemy ships rather than destroying them.
• plunders: will board and pillage enemy ships before destroying them.
• vindictive: this ship continues to fire at its target even after the target is dead, while the target is beginning to explode. (v. 0.9.0)
• unconstrained: the ship will fly outside the "invisible fence" that ships usually stay within. (v. 0.9.1)
• coward: if this ship is not the flagship of a fleet, it will desert its flagship and flee the system if its shields drop to zero. (v. 0.9.0)
• appeasing: if this ship's hull and shield strength drops low enough, it will dump cargo to try to distract or appease its attacker. (v. 0.9.5)
• opportunistic: this ship's turrets will track targets independently instead of focusing fire. They also scan back and forth when no target is present. (v. 0.9.7)

Flags that control NPCs:

• staying: never leaves the system it starts out in.
• entering: enters its starting system via hyperspace instead of appearing there.
• waiting: starts out in space in its system.
• launching: takes off from the planet with the player, even if it normally couldn't land there. (v. 0.9.9)
• fleeing: avoids combat if it can jump or land, and will not take off after landing until the player next takes off.
• derelict: starts out disabled.
• uninterested: does not follow the player's flagship around (i.e. does not behave like an escort).

Non-combat goals:

• surveillance: scans random ships and visits random planets in system.
• mining: this ship will circle around the system looking for minable asteroids. When it finds one it will attack it. (v. 0.9.5)
• harvests: this ship picks up any flotsam that is in front of it. Mining ships should do this, as should pirates who are distracted by ships dumping cargo to appease them. (v. 0.9.5)
• swarming: ships of this type will "swarm" around any friendly, non-swarming ships that are in-system. No more than six ships will swarm a given target. Any swarming ship with nothing to swarm will try to land on a planet instead. (v. 0.9.1)

Special flags:

• escort: this ship will show up in the player's escort list. (Use this for mission NPCs that you are supposed to accompany, for example.)
• target: this ship is highlighted by making it flash in the radar, and in the target display it is labeled as a "mission target." (v. 0.9.7)
• marked: only attacks player ships, and only player ships will attack it. (v. 0.9.7)
• mute: this ship will not talk to you if you hail it (and therefore can't assist you, either). (v. 0.9.7)

In addition to these flags, the personality also stores a "confusion." This is a random error that is added to a ship's targeting systems, to make it look a bit more random and organic; otherwise, all AI ships would always fire at the exact center of their target, which looks rather unrealistic. The confusion value is the maximum error in pixels, and defaults to 10. Generally I use a value of 10 for military ships, 20 for pirates, 30 for skilled merchants and 40 for ordinary merchants.