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XCOMUFO & Xenocide

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Afflicted

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Im really interessted in working to make Xenocide for obvious reasons, first of all I loved the

X-Com series and was pissed off when (what ever game company owns the licence now) cancelled all games that were being made. Second of all I have way too much time :D . I dont have any skills with programing or anything well.... important, but if you guys can give me some pointers on what to get famillier with that would be great.

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Im really interessted in working to make Xenocide for obvious reasons, first of all I loved the

X-Com series and was pissed off when (what ever game company owns the licence now) cancelled all games that were being made. Second of all I have way too much time  :D . I dont have any skills with programing or anything well.... important, but if you guys can give me some pointers on what to get famillier with that would be great.

You can start working in the names database (it is already posted)... Do not under any circunstance add a name from XCOM as had been mentioned before...

 

Greetings

Red Knight

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I worked abit on the names and was wondering if you'd want Korean along with Chinese and Japanese for the asian names, and what do you mean by using X-Com names?

 

  And shouldnt there be more ethnic groups for Europe?

Any name that appeared in the X-com games should not be put in. :)

 

For the Oceana continent there just has to be a Bruce in there.

 

http://www.behindthename.com/ Is a good refernce for names if anyone is interested :)

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I worked abit on the names and was wondering if you'd want Korean along with Chinese and Japanese for the asian names, and what do you mean by using X-Com names?

 

  And shouldnt there be more ethnic groups for Europe?

The names are OK, there are etnics missing we know it... so its somebodys work to add them. One minor correction

 

Use

<lastname>Herrero</lastname>

Instead of

<name>Herrero</name>

when you are adding a last name... the name tag is supposed to be only for names.

 

Can anyone correct German and French (those have that error too)...

 

Greetings

Red Knight

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I fixed the lastname problem, and I just need to know a couple things.

 

Should I add Spain and Portugal into Europe or just keep them in South America?

 

Do I add Russia to Europe or Asia (if you use character models for ethnic groups Russians dont look oriental)?

 

And can I add Polish or English to Europe?

 

And do you guys have an IRC channel or something like that?

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There is no reason why you shouldnt add them. So do it, the same for the spain (spanish is not spain, in fact i live in a spanish speaking country, and our spanish is pretty different with Spain's Spanish, even though we can understand each other without problems). So if you have the resources then add them... the same for the default statements about language distribution, i had added Argentina and a default for Latin America but that doesnt means every country have those defaults... It is just i dont want to assume something about names distributions in countries that i dont know... It doesnt matters how many names you put in there (30 males, 30 female, 60 lastnames) is more than enough, but the quantity in the database wont means anything in the game cause we will have a specified distribution for every country...

 

Greetings

Red Knight

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Does it really matter what names do they have when you hire them? At least I allways rename them asap when they are transferred to my base. I allways rename them as my family, relatives and friends. (Of course my own name for the best rookie) :P

The game gets much cooler that way. Also for example, if some rookie has a good strength I rename him with someone from my relatives who is strong. U know? I think the game gets even more intensive when you have personal names for your soldiers.

 

Is there really people who DON'T do this? :uh:

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RK, I usually don't rename soldiers unless they've been particularly heroic and lasted for 10+ missions or get more than 10+kills. Then they become personal and I'll try to save them. The only renaming other than that is what job they're good for.

 

Nypervoid, it is important to have each soldier with a name, how good would the first game have been if they didn't have names?

 

Because of the open ended nature of the game we have to put in the extra work of creating name lists, even if the player decides to rename their soldiers.

 

Afflicted, Portugal and Spain are part of Europe. Russia politically speaking is on it's own, neither European nor Asian. Oceana is Australia, New Zealand and all the other countries in that area. May I suggest if you are going to do the names for us that you do a bit of research on countries and continents? Google is your friend. :)

 

If we are going to have names from each country it might be a good idea to list the countries we are going to have named in the geoscape.

 

IE. Canada, North America, South America, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Portugal and so on. Or are we just having a list for each continent. If we're going for the seperate country option http://www.425dxn.org/dxcc/dxccmain.html is a starter for a country list.

 

http://www.babyzone.com/babynames/theworld.asp

Is another good resource for world names.

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For Continents like Ocienia, I was thinking of having some code making it half english names and half arabic names (Indonesia, etc. Dont look at me for code). Same with multi-cultural countries like Canada, having code making a vast majority of French and English, but a minority of all other ethnic groups, and I've added a lot more ethnicalities, and will continue working on it, I will be done fully by wensday.
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Had changed the XML schema to accomodate some issues that Afflicted had raised in previous posts, now ethnics are unrelated to continents and countries... continent has default rules about naming conditions (in the case of South America i had set the default as it should be in Argentina), and country specific that override the default (in the case of South America, Brazil ones)...

 

Greetings

Red Knight

names.txt

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Guest stewart
For the Oceana continent there just has to be a Bruce in there.

Ya but then we need XCOM personall in charge of Logical Positivism, and of course no poofas.

 

As for names, I wouldn't worry too much about if they're are XCOM names or not. You can't copyright "Norman Thompson" after all.

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  • 2 months later...
At least I allways rename them asap when they are transferred to my base.

I'm right with you Nyyperoid. I don't name them immediately, but I do as soon as they get a kill, or sometimes even if they get a little experience on a mission. Not family names, or anything, but Sweeper, Jake, Madre Maria, Conifer, Catskin, Robot, whatever. It adds flava. On the other hand, I agree that original names are essential, not only to add to the realism of the game, but just for the sake of keeping with the x-com tradition. I think I'll go add some genuine names right now. :D

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If this isn't already the plan, may I suggest the following:

Rather than make a list for every country, make a list for every major language, and assign languages to each continent.

 

When you hire soldiers in a base for a given continent, the naming code searches for that continent's languages, randomly picking a language (based on a weighted system maybe) and then picking a name from that language.

 

You could then weight the languages for each continent to get a sampling of each language. For example, you make a list of french names. Those names could be used in Europe, North America, and Africa (and I expect other areas). North America would also have english, spanish, and several other languages, each given a percentage based on the rough estimate of those speaking the language. When a soldier is hired from North America, the code randomly picks a numer between 1-100, which is compared to the percentages. A language is chosen from that, and a name is picked from the appropriate list.

 

This system would require you to make a list of names for each language you wanted to include, rather than every country. I know this can be just as complicated as by country in some ways, but I think it would cut down on duplication. The nit-picky part is when you decide just how many languages there should be in each continent, and what the percentages are. But then, you can only please most of the people some of the time, right?

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Hey! That's a good idea! The same could work for skin color and general appearance. I don't know if this has already been brought up but it would be pretty silly if every Brit, much less every American, was white, or for that matter if every South African was black.
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Rather than make a list for every country, make a list for every major language, and assign languages to each continent.

Shame on you Breunor... that was exactly the change I made the database like 2 months ago... :devillaugh:

 

That database needs to be completed so anyone here that wants to add languages and names for it can do it...

 

Greetings

Red Knight

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I do not want to complicate things, but I want to mention that many countries (at least pretty much all East European) have different female and male last names. I suggest to add a tag to last name lists which would specify whether it is female, male or both.
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I totally agree w/ mamutas on the last names...I remember renaming a character to myself only to find it was a female...you might even just put the male and female sexual symbols... ^_^
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Good point, mamutas. It seems logical and practical to add the sex symbol to the soldier.

 

They have the different last name thingy in Spain too, I think. A can't be the last letter in a mans' last name and O can't be it in womans'. Or is it the other way around :P ?

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I've probably got the wrong end of the stick here but are we talking about a flag on the names so we can link it to the correct face type? Because the portrait will show what sex the person will be. The flag M or F would load up one of the correct type of models and skins.
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Why complicate that in the database you can tag names as female or male, so if you want a name with both... Just put it twice... As a rule to avoid that kind of exceptional behaivior that will complicate programming, dont use that type of names. We are using ethnics as a starting point instead of countries to avoid that...

 

Take a look at the current state of the database some post ago...

 

Greetings

Red Knight

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Yes, I did look in the latest version of the database. There are tags for male and female first names, but last names are sexless (is that a word?).

 

Lets look at the example. Russians have sex in some of their last names.

Here is a male: Alex Pirogov. Here is a female: Natasha Pirogova.

So what about Alex Pirogova? Is it male or female? Well, it is female because of the last name and Alex could be a female first name too.

What about Natasha Pirogov? Nonsense. Pirogov is male last name, but male can never be named Natasha in Russia.

 

So, there should be FirstNameMale, FirstNameFemale, LastNameMale and LastNameFemale. We can avoid LastNameBoth, as we can put those names in both categories.

 

P.S. Original XCom had that trouble by matching female first and male last names. It was looking so silly.

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That is only the names database, similar databases for other things can be used... so militar organizations and the like can be added too (in another database file)... So when we need then we look in the appropriate place... Shadowhawk a lot of time ago has started a database like for technology (I had modify it a little to structure it better, take a look at the CVS) or someone with CVS access post it here (I dont have from here, public terminal)...

 

Greetings

Red Knight

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Or you could simply log into sf and browse the cvs tree from there :)

 

One thing that needs to be done is replacing the c-style comments with html comments :)

 

oh and some admin PLEASE let me upload xml-files...

techtree.txt

Edited by LordT
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I had no idea last names were different for the sexes anywhere! What a yankee yutz! Oh well. So what about Mamutas' question? Is it easy to add Pirogov and Pirogova to the names list, and have them sex-linked as well as nation-linked?
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I don't have the file right here but in it, all was linked in this way:

Continent

Country

Sex

Firstnames

Lastnames

Wouldnt be to hard to change a little layout no?

 

(It was a while since a looked at it so it could've changed...)

Edited by LordT
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  • 3 weeks later...

There seems to be a similar discussion going on elsewhere and I'm not sure which is the right place to post this. So, I'll do both, what the hey.

 

I got my hands on a list of elite units from around the world and pared it down to the countries that were funding x-com in the original game. This list is sorted in alphabetical order and by country, so you could select an elite unit at random to add to each operative's background. This database seems to be the likely location for such data, so here's the list.

Elite_Units.txt

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