Fix the Random Name Generator, if not for WoM, for FE please.

My polish friend, Polszczyzna, thinks you're crazy. If anything the generated names need more spice... and consonants.

I would not say that is such 'colorful' way, but ... yes it can have been better. Developers should perhaps play others games and compare?

I get the feeling they have played other games, otherwise I doubt they'd be where they are today if they didn't have past experience in playing other games. To really be a game developer you have to have a bit of passion for games to begin with.

No doubt with Derek "Kael" Paxton on board, the guy who created and developed FFH2 we likely won't see this problem with FE... I hope.

Yeah... RNG (no pun intended) should be better. Some civs could have more consonants, others could have more vowels etc. How about that one civ would use only names that both females and males use (the one with egalitarian trait, i mean, lack of gender specific names certainly would be egalitarion. In a way... there's nothing wrong with different names for genders (right?))

They are often ok if you just chop a syllable or two off the end.

I must say that I never encountered that problem because I always give unique names anyway.
But, yeah, sure, if the generator sucks, make it better. Someday. In my opinion, that´s one of the less pressing issues...

I agree completely with the OP. My only suggestion is to select randomly from the list of pre-defined names after the capital is founded (or at least start at a random position in the list). I did get kind of tired of having the same city name progression in each game of SMAC and FfH2 (Golden Leane, Balderham, Timberling, etc.) I almost never saw the names at the bottom of the list, which is a waste.

+1 to the OP.

this may be a small issue, but by the same token it must surely also be one of the easiest to fix.

there must be no other easier way of lending a little bit of individuality to the factions than simply giving them each a long list of individually tailored names. for example, elven/welsh/arthurian names for paridien, english/shire type names for tarth, faux latin type names for kraxis, or whatever.

I agree. I haven't read Brad's book or really any history to the lore but a list of faction-specific names would be cool and should be easy to implement. OMG, I agree with Lord Xia! JK.

This is my solution - there's often a decent name buried in there, somewhere, it's just padded with unpronounceable syllables.

I know that much better random name generators are possible, but I prefer FfH2's approach: no random name generator but just fixed lists of city names for each civilization. You really felt a connection to cities like Vallus and Kalocly and Dis after seeing them in several games, they had a history.

I'm generally a fan of procedurally generated content, but I'm not sure it's the answer when it comes to names - a human can come up with names that are more memorable and pronounceable, and more closely tied to a particular civilization's culture and history (city names from the campaign should appear in new games, for example), than any random generator I've seen so far.

Ok, sure, a simple list of names could be pretty easy to implement.
But even though that would perhaps be something between 4 and 15+ hours of work, depending on how thoroughly that would be thought through.
If you really dug into the matter, did research on citynames in different languages for all of the factions, and if there perhaps also some problem with integrating these schemes would arise, than this could well amount to a day of work for a programmer and an additional two days for the guy who has to come up with the names.

Given that this really is a minor issue and that there are several other minor issues still unsolved, I wouldn´t expect this one to be resolved anytime soon.
Patch 1.3 perhaps?

unpronounceable names don't bother me a lot, some of those names are even charming, but I can't get over a group of three heroes with the same name, looks and strenghts

Ah but it's easier than that! They just need to present the forums with a "City Name Contest"

I mean I agree it's a minor issue, but hey, while we're waiting for more news on Fallen Enchantress we might as well bring up the minor changes we'd like to see in it - memorable names you can pronounce may not be game changing, but it's a nice touch that adds to the overall "polish" WoM was so sorely lacking.

I doubt that it would me less work to manage such a contest than it would be to do it themselves.

But, sure, it´s totally ok to bring up such topics, why not.

Here I'd like to disagree.

Imo it's not a minor issue at all. It's one of the big factors making Elemental having almost no atmosphere. The enemies capital is called Blruglxyr... yeah... who cares? And I just recruited a hero called Blurglxyr. Yay for me?

Let's attack Blruglxyr... hm... was that this city or that one? Oh, dunno, from now on I remember it as city near the lake and city in the down-left corner.

How.... exciting.

 

And the fix for this kind of an issue should be able to be implemented in less than an hour by a single programmer.

Edit: Aaaand I'm out. Can't replace the system used to generate names, and since it sucks from the get-go I can only make it stink slightly less instead of making it awesome.

My plan was to bring over the name generator from Dwarf Fortress, but... another time maybe.

I really just never have had that problem. Perhaps I don´t even read all the names? I dunno, I only know that this hasn´t yet bothered me.

But ok, so now I have tried around a little with visual basic to make a simple random name generator.
It´s not hard. But.
As I expected, programming this thing is only the smallest part of the work.

1. Letters as components

The simplest approach, randomly picking a letter from the alphabet for a random number of times and adding it up to a word, is no good because it can produce those strange names that people are complaining about here and because the names it creates in general lack the sound of city-names.
Like: Z-y-g-l-e-k

2. Syllables as components

A better approach would be to rather establish a library of syllables that are used in forming the names.
Like: Nan-wen, Nan-wal-ror

3. Words as components

A completely different approach would be using established words to form the names of the cities.
Like in: Moor-dock, Temper-ville, Shatter-shine

This gives goodsounding results most of the time, but it is a lot more work than it seems to be.
First you got the problem of bad intra-name matches like "Mountain-hill" (similarity of the components gives the feeling of conceptual contradiction or repetition) or "River-River" (just two identical components).
The latter is easy to fix, you just have to check if the components are identical and, if they are, reroll the second component.
The former one is not that easy to fix though.
For this you would either need different lists of components that go together or you would need to assign attributes to the different components that regulate which entries may go together.
Of course you could manually check which components may pose a problem and sort those out by hand so that odd combinations can´t occur in the first place, but that would also mean sorting through the words and combining them to test out which go and which don´t.

The second problem would be bad cityname <-> world relations.
If you got a city named "Glitterbog" when no bog or swamp is near or the city of "Silverycoast" founded just below a mighty mountainrange and screens away from the next watertile, then this could be anti-immersive and would counteract the whole point of renewing the name-generator.
And I don´t even know if it is possible for the name-generator in Elemental to look up the terrain surrounding a city.
Even if it was you would again have to have different lists or apply attributes to the components to match terrain with corresponding terrain-specific names.

The third problem would be to fill the lists with words to be used as components.
That doesn´t seem to be a lot of work but if you don´t want names to repeat every dozen times you would want this lists to be quite long.
But it goes on...

4. Mixed Method

This is what I would probably aim at.
Mix the concepts of random letters and syllables with predefined names.
Like: "Mount-Ill-glam", "A-lyx-ang-fort"

Not that hard to do.
The good thing here is that you can have unique parts of a cities name, e.g. not "Dog-ford", "Hard-ford", "Grendel-ford", but "Da-gun-ford", "Ker-thel-ford", "Nu-mes-ford".
Still you would have to come up with rules for how the components could be combined.
So that you wouldn´t get e.g. "Wood-ly-xr-ford" (random syllables between words).
These rules could get rather complex.
Especially when you

5. Do it all over again for each faction and give each one a unique style

To do that you first have to think about naming conventions on one hand and about the language and the values and the flair of the respective faction on the other hand.
Does Ythril have city names like "Bloodfield", "Goreham", "Darkshire", "Suffering"?
Or more like "Kyth-karn", "Klynth-gomu", Khyzz-farath"?
Would "-kam", "-gomu" and "-farath" be conventional endsyllables of citynames?
Or would rather "Kyth-", "Klynth-" and "Khyzz-" be the components that should appear more often in those names?
Perhaps you want to define custom words for a faction to be used as in the normal random-words method? So that you would have some naming convention like "Klynth-Utai", "Klynth-Gorai", "Klynth-Mashad", etc.?
These things have to be thought up and decided; for each faction.
This REALLY can be a lot of work if you wanna do it right.
And I would see no point in just barely fixing the issue.
Why take the time to come up with 100 citynames on a list for all factions when this fixes a problem only halfway that only a few people have?
Or why take the time to come up with 50 individual names for each faction when you will still have to do the very basic thinking that could also lead you to a faction-specific naming-convention that you could use in a more powerful random generator?

PS: In Paradox´es "Victoria 2" they got a very small but very cool feature. The world map features the names of the countries and the size and font of those names changes corresponding to the form and the size of this country. So if you play, say, Burma and colonize Africa, a big bold "Burmese Africa" could be read there on the map. This really furthers immersion immensely even though it could be considered a minor detail.
So if whe consider random names in Elemental to be a similar detail, Stardock should take their time to make a really good random name generator instead of just improving it to average quality.
Else I would consider development-ressources to be wasted, as well as a chance to shine with a little detail that enhances immersion and thus fun of playing the game.

So all in good time I would say...

And:

No. That is - only if everything is layed out perfectly and no problem whatsoever arises.
Development time for the generator would definitvely not fall into that one hour but would rather surpass this significantly.
Really, come on. If things like this could be fixed in one hour of work, Fallen Enchantress would already have hitten the shelves weeks ago...

 

 

What, you say it hasn't been released allready? Vapourware! (Yeah, I'm ashamed now for linking to that. )

 

Getting a sizable numbers of names for each city most likely would take less time then producing a decent random name generator. Just set up a list on a blackboard in the office and over the time of some months ('till FE gets released) it will surely have filled up with enough names.

Not perfect, but still an improvement.

May I dare to suggest that this may be because the current names just aren't enticing to read at all? (Since random letter combinations just don't lead themselves to be neither read or memorized very well.)

 

----------------------

Still, an excellent post you've made.

You've described some great ways to make semi-random name generators. Especially a city name generator combined with the ability to read map features would be great for atmosphere imo.

But I'd also be happy with a generator that would have some consistency for races, or for the genders for childrens.

Zyglek sounds like a fine name to me. Iyyiioieex not so much.

Names representative of factions would add more depth.  I bought the version with the map, and I always change my city names to those on the map or name them after characters in the book.  After Procipinee father's name for example---Amaria.

And rightfully so.


But ok, now I have a simple Visual Basic program that reads in the lists I have defined, puts them into an Arraylist and randomly puts together a name from e.g. list A and list B, standing for the beginning and the ending of the name.
I got two lists with 83 and 80 components respectively.
That gives 6640 possible combinations. Still I got components or even whole names repeating more often than others, and some combinations just sound silly.

Now A) I don´t know if this has got something to do with the way I create (pseudo-)random numbers; I think I got that quite right, but I´m a lousy programmer, just having started with it, so perhaps I´ve just got something coded as it should not be, resulting in less random numbers than should be.

But based on what I have here, even 80x80 components does not ensure enough variance.
Perhaps I will try and increase the amount of possible combinations by allowing 2-components and 3-components combinations.
So you would have things like Moor-bay as well as Moor-dock-bay.
That would boost possible combinations to other 500.000 and could well be enough.

As to B ), silly or odd sounding combinations, perhaps this should simply be tolerated?
I mean, it´s obviously "a lot" of work to go through every possible combination and judge if it is ok or not.
A simple "reroll name" button would solve that issue quite elegantly.
Have to say, I don´t even recall if Elemental already had such a button?

...
...
...

Ok, now I tried it out. Added the possibility to have 2-c as well as 3-c combinations and added a chance to have designations(?) in front of the name, like in "Castle Dusk-wind-vale".
Now diversity is much better, even though you still sometimes get odd combinations.
But I would say that with a little tweaking of the lists, this could be a good base-concept for a random name generator.



From what I´ve tested out now I would say that it wouldn´t be much more effort.
If you´ve already decided that "-putnam" should be a common endsyllable of the faction´s cities, than you can just as quickly add it to the generators list.
As I have programmed it here, it reads in simple txt files that I can keep open in an editor and expand as I wish. Really simple and quick once it is set up.
Stardock could most possibly even also use simple txt files as a base for it´s imagined future namegenerator, so that users could simply change those lists as they wanted to (Paradox does it that way).


Thanks.


As I would judge now, this wouldn´t be much effort when it comes to programming, but you would have to design lists with components that match in a way that a specific gender is associated. Ok, simplest thing would be to add an "a" at the end of a female name, but if done right this could take some time.


Yeah, Elementals name generator really has a... quite wide variance...


Surely, but as said this would require quite an effort, cause you would have to come up with naming conventions that would be  representative of the respective faction and that would match that factions theme/flair..

Here's my modded namegenerator using words from Dwarf fortress: https://forums.elementalgame.com/408124 

Cool thing, thought it didn´t work?
Care to elaborate what is hardcoded and what can be altered and what you actually did now to alter the generator?
I just had a look at named XML file but I only get a very rough overview, cause my XML skills are.. well... nonexistent.

 

PS: Do I get it correctly that there is (yet) no possibility to create different name-generation rules for different factions?

Basically, the current namegen is just random letters piled on each other. I inserted a vast library of words, taken from Dwarf Fortress, that aren't nearly as random. There are 8000 nonsensical words like noloc, suku, tikbo. There are also 4000 words like three, necro, gate, order. And then there are rules that decide how these words are combined.

Did you follow the installation notes?

Yeah, can't make different rules for different factions.