Soldier names

[Son_of_Orion]

I would like to help with this little project. I've expanded on several of the namesets provided by Raguson (though some of the changes are slight), and even made a few new sets. A lot of them are quite long. Hope you enjoy.

I've uploaded a few to this site, but the rest can be found here:

Japanese
Hungarian
German
Russian
Danish
Romanian
Polish
Spanish
Italian
Portuguese
Norwegian
Greek

[Ishmaeel]

Sorry for the necro. I compiled some Turkish names, so if the window for applications is still open, I'd like to throw them through

By the way, I was going through the other files and I noticed that the first 132 names in Hungarian.nam are all Turkish. It kinda looks like a copy/paste mishap to me.

[SupSuper]

If you could fix it that'd be great. The problem with crowdsourcing these soldier names is there's no easy way to validate them. Maybe I should only let native language translators submit them.

[Ishmaeel]

Here you are.

Removed the Turkish names, removed several dupes and sorted the lists while I was at it.
I don't have any means to verify the remaining names either.

[54x]

Sorry for the necro. I compiled some Turkish names, so if the window for applications is still open, I'd like to throw them through

By the way, I was going through the other files and I noticed that the first 132 names in Hungarian.nam are all Turkish. It kinda looks like a copy/paste mishap to me.

Ah, that may be Fenyo's problem with the file then. Thanks very much!

[Solarius Scorch]

Could we please include soldiers' nationality somewhere in the UI? I don't know where half my team comes from, they have names that don't tell me anything (and I consider myself rather knowledgeable in this respect, I did 3 years of culture studies ).

[hszp]

I was thinking a bit about this soldier nationality. I wanted to add tiny flags somewhere.
It's complicated: the names are taken from real world language files whereas in the xcom world, we have a different set of countries. So it would not be appropriate to set a Dutch citizenship for a soldier when in the distant x-com future of 1999, you only have a United European citizenship, no Netherlands. Soldiers could have an ethnicity property but it's difficult to assign flags to those.
Of course, a trivial solution is that you assign 'nationality' to the language files one to one and don't care about any complications.

[Solarius Scorch]

Of course, a trivial solution is that you assign 'nationality' to the language files one to one and don't care about any complications.

I think that'd be fine; after all nationality has no real function, it's just a flavour.
Besides, it sounds easy to do, so it's more likely to happen.

[Sharp]

Soldiers take names from the various name files which can be customised, assuming any modifications are kept to the current convention then it's feasible to add nationality info where it just says the title of the name file chosen, Flags would be more tricky as that would have to be hard coded to display certain flag on certain nationality.

Most of the name pairings are fairly unique so it is possible to know the nationality from the name anyway though although some of the names are cultural rather then nation specific like Arabic and Hindi, although the latter is mainly one country the former has many nations. Could always change Hindi to Indian though and copy-paste Arabic for as many countries you want so you can have Egyptian, Saudi, Libyan etc...

[hszp]

Could always change Hindi to Indian though and copy-paste Arabic for as many countries you want so you can have Egyptian, Saudi, Libyan etc...

There are multilingual countries though. Copy-pasting is a bad sign in itself, but when you start doing "cat Dutch.lng French.lng >Belgian.lng", you can be sure you're doing it wrong =)

[Sharp]

The world is a melting pot of culture, really you could just have any of the names in the soldier names file be from any country. The American name file is really a bunch of names from European cultures for the most part.

Copy-paste is just for ease not accuracy and I'm not advocating the dev's actually do that, it's more to the individual player how much accuracy they want of names in nationalities. For me Russian and Slovakian could be used for many Eastern European countries so if I wanted I could just copy paste and add it for Ukraine and others, pretty much all countries from the Baltic to the Balkans, it wouldn't be accurate but personally for me it would be fine as I can't really tell the difference but I definitely wouldn't want it on any of the releases from OXC, just something I could do for me maybe in combination with MKSheppards improved nations mod . If anything does go on OXC officially then it would be nice for it to be accurate in regards to names but with the melting pot culture of many countries then it won't be accurate.

Maybe just imagine the world of XCOM is one rife with fascism.

[Shoes]

Would an appropriate way to approach this to add a nationality to the soldier via source? And then have that nationality determine the persons name; one nationality could have access several name lists.

[Sharp]

Yes and no, that would work but then it would have to be hard coded to take from specific name lists which means you can't mod in more name lists. I suppose you could have a namelist ruleset type thing which can have list of nationalities and what name files it will use on them to allow it to be modifiable so then you can add as many nationalities and name files as you want

[Solarius Scorch]

Perhaps the simplest method would be to have one a function where one file can only apply to one specific nationality, but one nationality can be tied to several files. This would mean that different nationalities with the same nameset would need separate files of mostly the same content, which isn't very elegant but would solve these problems without creating new ones.

[Shoes]

I suppose you could have a namelist ruleset type thing which can have list of nationalities and what name files it will use on them to allow it to be modifiable so then you can add as many nationalities and name files as you want

Yup, that's what I was thinking.

Perhaps the simplest method would be to have one a function where one file can only apply to one specific nationality, but one nationality can be tied to several files. This would mean that different nationalities with the same nameset would need separate files of mostly the same content, which isn't very elegant but would solve these problems without creating new ones.

This can be done via rulesets like Sharp and I are saying. Modability could mean you could have a English-US namesfile under the US ruleset, and English-CAN under Canadiens or what have you.