librea

[cazfi]

 Another way I may help Alien Invasion are character names.

 My wife is name expert, I don't mean only knowing what names really mean, but she has also been developing models how name fashions develop etc.

All this is in very early planning stage, but for some time I have been considering starting project called librea, library which would provide API for getting random names for game characters.

Anyway, even if we ignore librea for now, we may improve just name lists game uses. I just asked my wie if she would like to forecast what names are common in 2084 with specific history between now and then. Well, half an hour later she come back with list of most common forenames in English speaking world 2084 (most of them rediscovered from the end of 20th century due to cyclic nature of name fashions, with some completely new ones. Also, names that are "same" as current ones, are written a bit different way)

What's your opinion about proceeding with this? Do you consider your current system good enough so that it should not be touched at all, or would you accept contributions to this area?

[Kildor]

Well, the current name scheme in the game is obviously not perfect. It is simply pools of names (♂+♀)+pool of lastnames, without any culture|nation differentiation. And it can be improved.

May be we need to create some other mechanism to naming the units.

[cazfi]

At least I maneged to launch the librea project by creating svn repository for it and writing a couple of lines of code. I'm currently involved in quite many projects meaning each single project gets only little of my attention. Don't expect librea to be anything useful in short term (If we are lucky I can concentrate to it a bit during first half of 2012). By useful I mean API stable enough to build anything top of (you don't want your software the break every other night simply because API of dependency library changes in a incompatible way) Anyway, homepage for project is http://www.cazfi.net/librea/