Topic: Procedural naming-system?

[0d1n3oo3Broad]

Procedural naming-system?

a couple of weeks ago a question came into my mind: how will the non-player-based naming-system be handled/working?
we all know that we, the player, can name our species (cool would be to name our creature in the creature-stage btw ), planet, vehicles etc. etc. (but generally, what about cities/colonies, nations, lakes, mountains and mountainranges? do anyone know something about this?)
BUT: if we can name for example our city, how will the computer-player (can) handle this and name his city/ies? will the naming-system be based uppon our own choosen names and try to get as close as it could (possible?), or will it just be generated "on the fly" (procedurally), or (worsed case) due to a predefined file with (fantasy-)names?

i know there are some name-generators out in the net, but some results are somewhat strange....so i have a little bit of a skepticism of how the spore-team will handle this...

what do you think or what exactly do we know about that at this time?


/edit: another idea that came just in my mind: can we name stars or will they have no name until we arrive or also generated on some point of the game? it would be cool, if you could in creature or tribe stage look up into the sky at night, name some constellations and stars and several thousand years later, visit that stars with your spaceship....

[Caltrop]

Regardless of how these things are named when you first find them I am entirely confident that Maxis will give us the option to re-name them as we see fit.

[aligon]

/edit: another idea that came just in my mind: can we name stars or will they have no name until we arrive or also generated on some point of the game? it would be cool, if you could in creature or tribe stage look up into the sky at night, name some constellations and stars and several thousand years later, visit that stars with your spaceship....

Yes, that sounds like a great idea! I'm not sure they would implement something like that though  . It seems more likely that the planets are either procedurally named if they are computer-made or just use the name that the player that made it used.

[Yossitaru]

They've let us rename stuff in SimCity before (most prominent I can remember being in SC2K), and that would make for another point of interest on the data report.

"...
# of times renamed. [Click for list of alternate names]
..."

[Hectonkhyres]

I am fairly sure that stars and other objects will have a basic numerical designation until colonized by one race or another. But who the hell really knows at this stage of the game.

[The_Kev]

I agree. I think we don't know it, but the developers do. 

[Xenomorph]

we shall see. i dont think ít will take too long before we have a releasedate or demo.

[Uroboros]

A lot of things in the game dont need names, as we arent playing through the eyes of our own creations, but rather as a guiding hand in their own natural course through existance. Im certain that most of it will just be ad-libbed in our minds, if we interpret the game as a story.

[Switch]

Auto-generating names wouldn't be a huge problem... at least not for those guys. Just have a bunch of prefixes, suffixes, and maybe one or two syllables for the middle of the word, and switch randomly between them for different combinations. I would imagine this would be one way they could do it. Though hopefully they will give you the option to rename things as you see fit.

[munchkin5]

i think most things will be named maually before they are loaded, and thats it.

[The_Kev]

I you create your own planet, you just put the names of mountains and things like that on it by yourself, only the planets that are procedural generated need a procedural naming system... but at a time the whole galaxy is only filled with player-made planets and with player-made names too. 

[Noflunk]

I feel that you get to name things you have direct control over (IE your creature, vehicles, cities (?) and your planet) now what would be interesting if you could name uninhabited planets. Im just assuming that inhabited planets would have other people creatures on it thus already being named. But I feel that being able to name things has always been a staple of Maxis games

[The_Kev]

Yes, and... now you say that, I found another problem... Somebody who is pissed off because he's penis creature is deleted can change planet names in Cock, Penis, Vagi.... oh well, you get it.

[Noflunk]

I would hope that the same screening of creatures would be implemented in the naming of them as well. It probably would be easier for the programmers to just make of "banned" words, much like this website has. And yes to jump to the next thought about people using symbols (aka things like A$$) im sure we can always report it in.

[Gungnir]

Procedural naming-system?

Looking at your screen name..is /that/ procedurally named?