Soldier names

[SupSuper]

Do you just feel that there's absolutely nothing you're good at, but you still got that itch to contribute to the project some way? Good news! Now you can contribute soldier names!

For the uninformed, X-Com generates soldier names by randomly matching a first name and a last name taken from a name pool for a certain region. Now's your chance to add a lot more variety into it!

The format's pretty simple, you can figure it out from the ones included in OpenXcom's data\SoldierName folder and even try them directly in-game. For more information see here: https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Soldier_Names_(OpenXcom)

[bramcor]

I was wondering if the ratio of 3:1 of male and female names is used for any particular reason?
Maybe in UFO:EU it directly affect how many male and female soldiers are generated when hiring soldiers in-game?

[SupSuper]

UFO:EU has a probability for generating male/female, but I don't think it's tied to the amount of names.

OpenXcom will just pick a name randomly and get the gender from there.

[anonilsus]

I think a 50:50 ratio would be a nice touch. That means statistically you hire 50% women and men each. I don't think its a good idea to make the dependent on balancing out soldier names.

[bramcor]

Just grabbed the 20 most used names and surnames from Statistics Denmark.

Now lets get those vikings into OpenXcom

[cort]

Here are the romanian male/female names and surnames, 40 of each.

[MKSheppard]

Since you plan to have independent lists for each nationality, would there be some way to incorporate this into the game itself? E.g. you would be able to see maybe a little flag symbol showing their nationality; so that you can have a North American base manned with 90% Americans and so on?

[shuuk]

Here the german part..
i add some i remove some now its perfect

[winterheart]

Russian names and surnames, both for male and female.

[Nemor]

British names attached. Included some Scottish and Welsh (no Irish yet).

[Esrael]

Hi, everyone!

Not a coder here, but I'd like to contribute by adding Finnish names. I like RyanCrierie's idea. In addition to the region of the base, the population size of the country could also affect the probability of an individual name set, if it's okay.

[Templayer]

Hi, I'm first posting here ! That idea with countries modifying names probability and small flags is great !

Anyway, here you go with Czech names !! Beware through, they use symbols like ?

[zGuba]

Same here - my first post here,  and attached 30 most popular Polish names and surnames for each gender. File using ANSI.

Best regards!

EDIT: I can readd Unicode version if needed..

[radius75]

For discussion:

Soldiers names in game and national characters of letters.

Example in Polish:

Jozef Dabrowski  >> Józef Dąbrowski

Is it a good idea?

The comparison: https://github.com/radius75/OpenXcom/compare/4be8d1355d63d4ebd141cd1f2e127904e74334f2...94b3dfc47b8ad64ee7cc56971b9391a8e9c9c90f

EDIT
And support from @cornels https://github.com/cornels/OpenXcom/compare/774541126ad7b9763f38f47cb9bdcee40898e08f...3ac69c783ba343fd5eaddbb2f814eb000d9c8db4

[SupSuper]

For discussion:

Soldiers names in game and national characters of letters.

Example in Polish:

Jozef Dabrowski  >> Józef Dąbrowski

Is it a good idea?

The comparison: https://github.com/radius75/OpenXcom/compare/4be8d1355d63d4ebd141cd1f2e127904e74334f2...94b3dfc47b8ad64ee7cc56971b9391a8e9c9c90f

EDIT
And support from @cornels https://github.com/cornels/OpenXcom/compare/774541126ad7b9763f38f47cb9bdcee40898e08f...3ac69c783ba343fd5eaddbb2f814eb000d9c8db4

Yeah I'm not sure which is better, accuracy or readability. Wouldn't that require Russian names to be in Cyrillic, etc? Every X-Com-like game (even the new one with tons of nationalities) seems to only uses the standard A-Z alphabet for soldier names, no national characters. But given most of us in this forum are used to funky alphabets, it's hard to get an unbiased opinion.

Would you rather see a soldier name list full of glyphs or just standard characters? Remember that soldier names are global (language-specific names would be a ton of work)