Character names

[Woreczko]

Check the "team_humans.ufo" file in the 2.1 branch - couple of african, arabian, european and chineese names there. What it badly lacks are the hindi names and maybe the turkish ones. (Let`s face it - we can`t have names for every language).

[eleazar]

(Let`s face it - we can`t have names for every language).

Maybe not, but with players all over the world, we can come reasonably close.

[eleazar]

Check the "team_humans.ufo" file in the 2.1 branch - couple of african, arabian, european and chineese names there. What it badly lacks are the hindi names and maybe the turkish ones....

Huh, looking back at the "team_humans" and "nations" files in 2.1 it seems that we had a more robust system.  Individual nation blocs could use multiple name lists, i.e. Oceania could use Indian, African, and Australian names without mixing them.

Anybody know why this was dropped in 2.2?
I tried swapping out the files, but something was wrong, and UFOAI didn't start.

[eleazar]

Ok, sorry for the triple post.

Looking over what's been gathered in this thread, combined with what was in 2.1 i see these lacks:

Eastern European: none

India: none

Portugese South American: none

Oriental (other than Chinese & Japanese): none

African: a few but not specific

Middle Eastern: a few but arabic only

[ufogio]

Ok, heres about 1000 North American surnames, with about 250 first names for each gender.

I tried to avoid alternate spellings of the same name, and first names of ambiguous gender to help keep thing clear for the player.

argh can you please remove these __MAC OS stuff and zip the names in a single folder? Ayway thank you very much, I'm using this list!

[FrancoC]

If you want, I can submit a list of italian names and lastnames. I extracted those from a 130k users DB, I have 3 lists, one for lastnames, 2 for male/female names.

You could use some in europe, but in N.America and S.America also.
Italian people moved out to other nations looking for a job and better opportunities last decades of 1800 to first decades of 1900.
Major flow, at least what I know, where to Northern Europe (Germany, Netherland, Belgium), North America (USA but also Canada I think), and South America (Argetina has the largest Italian community in the world, many of the lastnames have italian roots).

I will clean up the lists and post them as patch on SF, they will be longer than needed so you can use how many names you need, most frequent at top.

[cmdrquan]

I have code to read in the scripts in the form

name {
  nation {
    female...
    male...
    lastname...
  }
  nation2...

where nation is in the list
"neutral
latin
states
etc."

currently, when characters are generated their employee->nation is the key to which category of names to use.

having no nation or some other one defaults to neutral

unfortunately, soldiers fit into team human, scientists to human_scientist, workers...etc.
This means each type has its own name list.

therefore, I'd like comments on:
-keeping a region list for other characters (makes for bigger script)
-making other characters non-regional (neutral)
-some other design (restructuring and basically redoing my approach [potentially a lot of rework])

on a technical note, between campaign start and april 06, I had no missions appear so I'm not sure if my civilian/alien name change work/won't CTD. I will try a skirmish tonight.

[eleazar]

therefore, I'd like comments on:
-keeping a region list for other characters (makes for bigger script)
-making other characters non-regional (neutral)
-some other design (restructuring and basically redoing my approach [potentially a lot of rework])

I really don't see a reason why there should be different name lists for soldiers, scientists, etc.  However, since at least in multiplayer, aliens have names, we at least need to distinguish between human names and alien names.

Ideally i'd like to see each "nation" pull from a variety of ethnic lists, if applicable.  For instance a list of Spanish names could be used by North & South America & Europe.  This would prevent for instance a soldier from Oceania from getting a Swahili first name and an Indian last name, or someone having a half Japanese/Chinese name.


Also please note that in some languages, some scandinavian & russian, for instance, there is a different form of the last name depending on gender.


EDIT:
also there should be a way to associate certain face skins with each ethnic list.

[eleazar]

I will clean up the lists and post them as patch on SF, they will be longer than needed so you can use how many names you need, most frequent at top.

Please do.

I've been compiling lists of names, and have been going for 100-500 name each... which should be sufficient to make duplicate names seem about equally common as they are in real life.

[nemchenk]

I'd like to add some names to team_* in 2.2, just so we can have a bit more randomisation in 2.2.1. Shall I just compile a new list, or do we have a list in progress? To be clear, I am not talking about a smarter system which determines sex, race, originating country etc, but just more names so we don't have the same surname appearing twice in the starting squad

As to differentiating Ortnok, Tamaan, and other multiplayer alien names -- can't we just stick them into "nation: Tamaan" etc? Same method as human names.


Thanks,

nemchenk

[eleazar]

...or do we have a list in progress?

i've compiled this from this thread and other sources (see attached).

There are probably inaccuracies, but there is plenty to choose from.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[nemchenk]

That looks just the thing, eleazar!

Quick question -- what is the difference between columns D, E, and F? Being Russian I understand the need for male and female surnames, but I'm not sure what is happening when "surname", "male sur", and "fem sur" are present?

Thanks!

nemchenk

[nemchenk]

I added a bunch of names to both 2.2 and trunk -- at least they will padd out the random factor for now I used your spreadsheet as a base, then pulled out between 5 and 20 random names and surnames from each group. Should be good for now.

Also, I had to remove a couple non-ASCII characters as the game didn't like them -- you may want to do the same if/when you use these with the new and improved name system


Cheers,

nemchenk

[eleazar]

Quick question -- what is the difference between columns D, E, and F? Being Russian I understand the need for male and female surnames, but I'm not sure what is happening when "surname", "male sur", and "fem sur" are present?

Scandinavian languages don't necessarily use a gender-specific surnames, but they do sometimes.

[gruush]

If it would help at all, I have an enormous set of valid names for multiple ethnicities. Unfortunately, as they were all used for a baseball game, they're all male. But it's a huge list of surnames and first names, separated by ethnicity, including frequencies, in simple text format.