Climate and positional Citynames

May 10, 2009, 09:27:50 pm

Is there any way to take the stop-naming code (or idea, at least) and apply it to city names?

Perhaps a citylist like this:

Quote

Renton
Randomville
Sierra

[desert]
Brownsville
Sand City
Briar Gulch

[tropical]
Lush Gardens
Tree City

[mediterranean]
Ivoryville
Rome

[temperate]
Dallas
Plainville

[tundra]
Arctic City
Anchorage

[river]
Big River City
Natchez

[ocean]
Port Townsend
Port Apathy
Northport

That is, be able to define optional sections of the city file that would be chosen at random chance if a city was in a particular climate or by a land feature (rivers and ocean are all I can think of to detect).

How I think I'd do it (although config in simuconf.tab would be awesome):
- If city is detected X tiles away from water or river, 50% chance of name from one of those lists (if both, chances are 25% and 25%)
- Otherwise, city has 50% chance being named climate-specific name
- Otherwise, random from general list

I don't know if there is such code, but it would be also nice if Simutrans tracked which citynames it had used, and when it used up a particular category, didn't re-use them. I think it does this now and falls back on the generated ones? But just in case not...

So in simuconf.tab, the 'cadillac' solution would be to have:

Quote

cityname_desert_chance = 50
cityname_tropical_chance = 50
cityname_mediterranean_chance = 50
cityname_temperate_chance = 50
cityname_tundra_chance = 50
cityname_alpine_chance = 50
cityname_ocean_chance = 50
cityname_river_chance = 50

Failing that, perhaps something like... 33% chances across the board? But I think it'd be better to let players/pakmakers specify chances...

Also, I think I saw somewhere that the climate names can change... Perhaps the internal name that Simutrans uses, or even numbers (0-5 or 1-6 or whatever) would work fine...

Re: Climate and positional Citynames

Reply #1 – May 11, 2009, 12:13:07 pm

wow, nice idea! some work for translators, but definitely nice for games...