Soldier names

[Aldorn]

Hi,

Attached french names corrected (with accents as now in UTF8) + some added (in spirit of game, I mean people going to war, also 20-50 years old, in 1999)

Source : openxcom_git_master_2014_05_18_0656

[yrizoud]

There is no decision to put accents and other non-AZ characters in the generated names (yet).

[Aldorn]

Thanks Yrizoud, you saved me, as the uploaded file was absolutely not the right one, what a pity !

Now replaced

In fact, there were already accents in original file, but sometimes they were missing so I corrected them

Also two versions, with and without accents, just in case

Source : openxcom_git_master_2014_05_18_0656

[Lord Hoot]

Am I right in thinking that names are picked completely at random from the entire range of options, rather than the computer generating an equal number from each list, e.g. French, American, Dutch etc?

If that's the case then the proportions of available nationalities need a little work. There are like ten times as many Greek names as Hindi names, which is completely disproportionate- there are c20 million ethnic Greeks in the world and maybe 200 million Hindi speakers. That's just an example.

IMO there should be a large number of names representing each of the XCOM funding nations, and smaller numbers from other places.

[yrizoud]

I think one file is picked at random first, so each file gets equal opportunity.

[Falko]

i was told openxcom select a country and then a name
each country (=soldier name file) get on average the same amount of soldiers
if you want more american names you could copy American.nam to American1.nam ... AmericanXX.nam

if i ever got around to work with names i would do:

• the .nam-copying to emulate soldier-home frequency based on xcom founder, GDP, population = number of .nam files
• removing names more than 11 letters - so we have space for statstrings
• removing names less than 3 letters - if i can have "U E" as real name and enable statstrings that could confuse
• getting rid of duplicate in first/last name ("An An" is a correct chinese xcom soldier name but i prefer a difference between last and first name)
• removing all name lists with more than ~300? entries - for names/regions that i can acclaim some knowledge it seems the short lists are more distinguishable and look more correct (if i have huge amounts of time to waste i could look for frequent names instead of just removing too long lists)

[Solarius Scorch]

Also, I would like a simple line in the beginning of each nam file that determines weight of such file. Names that are more likely to appear would have a higher weight.
For example, assuming that each nation participates in X-Com to their full capabilities, and that each country is similarly militarized (which is not true, but we're talking an example only), the weight could be simply population of said country or group of countries.

[shuuk]

Updated German Version


Edit: im at work, so i cant rename this file to german.nam 

[yrizoud]

To bump on Solarius idea : Actually an even more powerful schange would be to have a ruleset entry which enumerates the nam files (and their respective weights).
This would allow for example :
- a mod which restricts to NATO names
- kiryu kai mod which uses exclusively Japanese names
- Pirates mod which uses exclusively its own custom nam file

[SupSuper]

Have fun with your patriotic modding.

[yrizoud]

Or a mod which picks names of forum members !
https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php?action=mlist;sort=posts;start=0;desc

[Solarius Scorch]

Or a mod which picks names of forum members !
https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php?action=mlist;sort=posts;start=0;desc

And destroy last bastions of suspension of disbelief?

[eXalted]

And more Slavic names in additional to the Russian ones -  Bulgarian names pack from me. Do these have to be uploaded somewhere else for approval in the future versions? Or this is the thread?

[SupSuper]

I've added them.

[eXalted]

Cool. Thanks!