FreeOrion

Mhm. The Chinese use a different character set for their servers than we do (we use ISO-8859, the Japanese use EUC-JP, don't know which one the Chinese are using). But I can definetely say that the Chinese (and Japanese, too) understand our romaji (roman characters) quite well, while we suck trying to learn their Hanzi, Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana etc.

_________________
Thy soul shall find itself alone
Mid dark thoughts of the gray tombstone
Not one, of all the crowd, to pry
Into thine hour of secrecy.

E.A. Poe, "Spirits of the Dead"

Actually that could be really interesting in that each RACE could have a name list.

I'd generally say not a good idea so as to allow a large number of AI players, but if memory/processing time wasn't a problem, then at the start of the game every species names all the stars on the map (you get to know their names when you know them) the default names for all the stars (which you can see at the beginning of the game) are the ones from the list for your species.


Actually that would be a good thing, having the default name of all stars visible... the "Actual name" could then be displayed when you contacted them (to allow for Orion and Homeworlds, as well a human players to not be given away)

The Actual name could then be changed on on initial colonization (this way only two names are given for a star ever)... as opposed to the more open idea of each player calls a star whatever they want.

I was sick and got tired of TV so i compiled a huge list of star names. Most of Drek's names are in there, and i added about 700 more. Most are actual star names, but i included various mythological names, and the names of scientists, sci-fi writers and artists. I deleted all duplicate names, and tried to remove any that could be confused: i.e. "Centaurus" and "Centauri".

And for the curious, the various names are grouped into catagories.

Get a longer list of star names.

I like the idea that each game you play will have a lot of stars with names different from your previous games. It helps to make each game seem unique.

Edison (as found on your list) wasn't a scientist, he was an inventor. Sublte difference.

Your Greek Pantheon list is also a little out of whack:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Gr ... al_figures - you don't have Ares on there for one thing.

Personally I'd skip using the Roman Panetheon at all as most of the more significant figures are already taken for our Solar System, and it doesn't seem right to use the left-overs for the rest of the cosmos.




Offtopic: First time I've heard of Basque's, so that'll be interesting to look into.

If you noticed more of the names on the "scientist" list, you would get the idea that i chose names based on a broad definition of the word "scientist."

I'm make no claims that any of these lists are complete or authoritive lists of whatever, just that they contain names that seem to me suitable for the nameing of stars. I also tried to remove all the names of bodies in the solar system, but probably missed some.

"Ares" is too close to "Aries", as explained earlier i tried to remove names that were similar enough to be easily confused.

What list did you base this on? There was an updated-from-v0.3 one on SVN already:

http://svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/freeo ... iew=markup

Also, you've got a lot of... "weird"... names in the list. A number of these were intentionally excluded from drek's and the SVN list. (drek specifically noted in a post that many of the real star names were weirder-sounding than names from other sources.) IMO it's better to have only good-looking and -sounding names for stars than a have a complete and thorough list of real star names or other themed names. (Though the removal of similar-sounding names is a good idea.)

Also also, you might want to put these categorized names (all of them, including "weird" ones) here:

http://freeorion.org/index.php/Themed_Names

(The ones not added by me weren't edited by me, so don't reflect my stylistic criteria)

I made a backup of the base starname file. It's identical to the one linked above.

As mentioned previously a complete list is not my goal, but a long list is. Apparently my "weirdness" tolerance is different. I removed a lot of names that i though would make players eye's glaze over. But i didn't want a list that sounded all Greco-Roman, either.


I did that, but had to make numerous subpages because the wiki only allows about 500 names per page.

There's certainly a large grey area, and I was rather conservative in my selections, while you appear to have been fairly inclusive. But stuff like "Tximistarri" or "Kaffaljidhmah" or "Manananggal" or "Itxasgorrieta" are just... too many syllables or consonants... at least for me.


I moved everything back to the main page. It seemed to work fine. Maybe make multiple smaller edits instead of one big one in future...? I've never seen any limits to the size of wiki pages, other than the warnings that start to appear after pages get big enough, and we've significantly exceeded that repeatedly. The only iffy case was the bottom one, "Other Mythological Creatures", which ends after "Ni", suggesting that more would follow, though there were none in your subpage either...

Huh, it cropped after "Ni" for me too. Maybe there was an invisible character causing the wiki trouble? I'll check it out later.

EDIT: yeah, it was an invisible character after "Ni". I thought i had converted to ASCII, but i guess that was at an earlier stage. I added the rest of the monsters to the wiki.

I don't really care which names are on the list, if the list is long and contains only distinct names. Weed away at them if you wish.

Beware.
The game will use the lines that start with "#" as star names too.