What a bugger! "FUBAR"

Have you ever wondered why your AuxShips with high IDs never seemed to work?

Well, I did a little research on my own before doing a search on the EVDC, and can assure you it's the weirdest engine treatment of IDs that I've ever seen.

The bug has remained since 1.0.1, and was never taken into account (well, mrxak notified it on the beta-testing list, but it was never changed).

I will explain the behaviour for those who don't have a clue what I'm talking about, and give my advice, but I'd like to know if it can be dealt with too

Whenever you use a düde ID between 128 and 255, the AuxShipDude field works fine, and Nova handles it perfectly. But as soon as you put an ID higher than 255, it starts fouling up.
Here's the explanation: say the ID of the wanted AuxShip is xxx, Nova will make that value enter between 128 and 255. To do so, it will take away the value "128" as many times as possible.

Basically, if you use 256 (Fed Patrol Boat), Nova takes away 128, and you get 256 - 128 = 128 (Lone Federation Ship). If you use 440, it does 440 - 128 = 312 (normally what I want => Arpia Prison Ship ), then 312 - 128 = 186 (Large Auroran Warship).

Now, the best thing to do to avoid being trapped and getting hyperioids instead of Arpia Member ships, or getting Auroran Warships instead of Bulk Freighters, try to find dude resources in the stock scenario that aren't used as much. If you can't do that, then you can always simply sacrifice another misn resource or two and use SpecialShips.

So what is the real range of d00ds? I dont have my bible handy. You mean that the last 3/4 or so are unreferencable by the auxship field?

Has this been submitted to the beta list?

My bet that the value is cast somehow in the code as an unsigned char, or some other similar thing (an unsigned char can have values from 0 to 256).

Auxiliary ships can indeed be replaced by special ships from an associated, invisble misson (for inwtance, when you get Pirate Valks escorts in the Pirate storyline). It's more powerful since you can directly assign them orders instead of having to setup a "psycho" or "friendly" government as one needed to do with Auxiliary ships that were to have some behavior, not to mention it's limited, in EVC/EVO.

Well, but if you are short on missions, it would be nice for everything to work properly.

The unsigned char idea fits, but it could just be legacy code trying to keep the values in range, but the range has since increased.