Ship names list anyone?

[Nibelung44]

So nobody seems to be bothered by the AI races with cities of Earth as ship names? That's strange! I made a quick replacement list for my games but really, I think it should be a staple of modding to have a nice list done correctly (I would like to do that but I'm already working too much and time left is for a bit of playing, not deep modding).

If nobody step in, I'll propose my list, but it is a bit of a lackluster though.

[tofudog]

By all means go ahead!
You can always post as WIP and update the thing as you go.
I myself only went so far as to import lists from SE 5. African and romanian (e.g.) name lists are sufficiently alien to me and have an inner consistency to them, so that I dont have to rack my brain to come up with something original.
I also started on german navy shipnames once (emulating S7´s fantastic work with british and japanese navy lists), but they never had that many ships, so I never finished that.

[Igard]

Hey, Nibelung44. There was a bug with the designs.txt file pre-expansion and that's the reason nobody's done one so far. I don't know yet if the bug's been fixed for RotS.

I did have a file with Star Trek names, but I seem to have lost it. [:(]

[feygan]

Looking at these one thing has occured to me, we can have a shipnames file for the player that has a set of ship names for specific types (cruisers, passenger ships etc), but the ship names file is just a list that will be randomly used by the empire.

Does anyone know if its possible to have a full shipnames file for each race?

[Igard]

Yes, feygan.  [:)]

The designs.txt file is used for that purpose. I still haven't tried it yet with the expansion, but pre-expansion myself and others couldn't get it to work.

[tjhkkr]

I suppose I could PM the CF people and see what they say...
Do they get irritated at questions? I have never contacted them other than to thank them.

[Haree78]

The designs.txt file should be fixed in the expansion, it was something that was picked up during beta testing.

The shipnames.txt and the designs.txt are quite different though. designs.txt is what it uses for AI auto ship design names whereas the shipnames.txt file is what it uses to name the ships the player creates.
So if I had 'Galactica' in the shipnames.txt file under cruisers I would get a cruiser called Galactica randomly when I create one no matter what race I am playing.
If I put 'Galactica' under one of the thirteen lists in designs.txt it would not affect the names of my ships but when the AI auto designs a ship of a race that uses them design names it could randomly pick Galactica for any ship type it designs.

[feygan]

ORIGINAL: Haree78

The designs.txt file should be fixed in the expansion, it was something that was picked up during beta testing.

The shipnames.txt and the designs.txt are quite different though. designs.txt is what it uses for AI auto ship design names whereas the shipnames.txt file is what it uses to name the ships the player creates.
So if I had 'Galactica' in the shipnames.txt file under cruisers I would get a cruiser called Galactica randomly when I create one no matter what race I am playing.
If I put 'Galactica' under one of the thirteen lists in designs.txt it would not affect the names of my ships but when the AI auto designs a ship of a race that uses them design names it could randomly pick Galactica for any ship type it designs.

Thanks for the explaination it clears things up. I'm guessing then that so far there is no way to have a specific name be selected by the ai for a specific ship type? For example I want an ai race to use "Sharlin" but putting it in the designs.txt will still only be random and it could endup being a colony ship?

[lordxorn]

The design.txt file info says that Each line is a single family and should ALWAYS be 14, even though there are more than that even in the vanilla DW. So in some way you can have some Race specific design names.

As far as nibelung's suggestion about Earth city names, maybe all the human races can share these like us ancient humans are their ancestors.

Or if you are creating a human like race, Earth city names would be cool to use in the shipnames.txt for each theme.