German and Russian placenames

[Philippeatbay]

If you wanted the map to only show German placenames when playing the German side and Russian placenames when playing the Soviet side, does it have to be done through side-specific mods, or is there a master file somewhere that controls that kind of thing?

Teutonic orthography would look hopelessly wrong when you're playing the Soviets, but would add some period color when playing the Germans. By the same token the Russian versions of the placenames look a little off for the Germans (but not too off if you're used to seeing slavicized names) but are warm-fuzzy inducing if you're playing the Soviets.

In the best of all possible worlds there would be two master lists of place names, and the one that would get pasted on the map would depend on which side you were playing.

The problem is that the place names are probably more than just decorations to the map hexes and might actually have a function in the game. If that's the case, messing with the place names could produce unfortunate results (or maybe just inconsistent ones, with the name on the map not matching the name in reports).

[lancer]

Hi Philippe,

The names are straight 'engine' map entries. There is a lot of code that references places but it deals with a system of location ID's, not names.

Having two sets of names where the appropriate names are loaded at game start is, off the top of my head, doable.

Name research is another matter entirely.

Cheers,
Cameron

[Philippeatbay]

Putting together two lists of names is just a research question, and there aren't that many place names. If all else fails there's an almost complete set of detailed German tactical maps at one of the American universities that was still online last time I looked. It will take a little while but I could put the two lists together. The question is what will be done with the two lists after they get drawn up.

[ernieschwitz]

Most likely you will need to put them in a stringlist, along with their coordinates, then make some code to replace all the names for the relevant player regime, one time.

[lancer]

Hi Philippe,

Leave it with me and I'll take a look at the code and let you know if it's something that I can do fairly easily (I think so).

I'm away for the weekend so it won't be until next week.

Cheers,
Cameron

[Philippeatbay]

Another thing to worry about is what will happen when you have two human players. If you have to have the same place-name list for both of them, then that would be the place names we are currently using. Otherwise it would be nice if the German player could always see German names, while his Soviet counterpart would always see Russian names, but all of this would happen during the same game.

[And I have to stop posting when I haven't had my morning coffee].

[lancer]

Hi Philippe,

Yep, that's a thought.

Cheers,
Cameron

[Philippeatbay]

I've made the first draft of an Excel spreadsheet with all the names of towns, rivers, and hills that currently appear on the map.

I need to go over it again because I've probably missed a few names. But if it turns out that the program is going to be co-operative I can add two more columns, one for the German player and one for the Soviet player.

Even if we can't ultimately do this I'll still send you the spreadsheet because it has turned up one or two spelling glitches that can be corrected.

I'll need your e-mail address because I've forgotten it.

Can the program handle umlauts or do I have to use the extra 'e'? And would you consider adding a couple of flavor cities (no effect on game play) to fill out a few blank areas for aesthetic reasons (like Poltava in the Ukraine, Baranovichi on the highway between Minsk and Brest-Litovsk, or Kazan near the bend in the Volga)?

[lancer]

Hi Philippe,

Haven't had a chance to look at the code yet but to answer your questions...

1. umlauts and other German accented characters should be O.K as I've already used them in-game but Soviet cryllic letters aren't. Unicode is a step to far for the engine (Vic might be able to add support for this but he's probably busy with Shadow Empires) and it can only handle ALT-codes which don't feature cryllic.

2. flavour cities are a no. With the unit counters, the map and the interface, there's a heap of visual information that people have to parse already to play the game and having them figure out which cities are real and which are just decoration is far from ideal. The map design has an underlying philosophy where everything on it has a game play purpose.

Thinking about it further the name change would probably need to be a game option where people can 'opt in'. As long as it's an option the German names could be made more Germanic & the Soviet more 'iski' for further immersion.

Let me check the code first to confirm that it's not too big a job before you put your toponymist's hat on.

Cheers,
Cameron

[Philippeatbay]

Cyrillic is a non-starter because too many people wouldn't be comfortable with it. Same goes for fraktur to a lesser extent, but fortunately the German military maps I've seen didn't use it so it's not needed.

A shame you can't add any more cities, but doing anything that would interfere with game balance at this point would not be a good idea.

I've been having lots of fun with German and Russian exonyms for the last few days. On a related note, in a moment of madness I picked up a copy of MMP's Kingdom of Heaven, and noticed (with great delight) that the scenario booklet has a gazeteer in six languages, some of them pretty intense. So fiddling with a few German and Russian place names barely registers on the obsessive-compulsive scale by comparison.

[lancer]

Hi Philippe,

I've managed to take a look at what is involved in doing this and I'm afraid the short answer is going to be no.

The long answer is that once a name is changed on the map, every other instance where that name is referred to in-game requires it to be identical otherwise there's going to be a lot of confused players. Everything is currently standardised.

There is a single central file that has all location coordinates and their names and it wouldn't be a big job to code up a map label changover at the start of every turn (for MP) or off a game (SP) to handle two different sets of names.

Which is all good.

However...

When I went through the data files I found close on 30 other files where names are referenced in one form or another. Some of these are easy to deal with but many others would require the use of special insertion tags as they are buried in sentences of text. File dealing with stuff like weather, rail conversions, decisions (lots), strategies, FSB locations, airfields, random personality backgrounds, VP locations, AI data, statistic trackers, tooltips and so on would all need to be updated and, in many cases, hand tweaked to handle in-line text.

I suspect once it was done it would prevent MP use due to the amount of processing that would be required at the beginning of each turn, so it would be a SP option only.

None of this is difficult to do code-wise but it's a very time intensive, fiddly, big job. As it would involve touching many different parts of the code base there is also a reasonable risk of unintended consequences. If it all went to plan perhaps a full weekend's work would do it but it could blow out well beyond that in the event of inadvertently breaking something.

Given my current work and family committments that's more time than I have availabe.

Having taken a look at this I'd offer the comment that when I designed and coded up the game I didn't do a very good job of modulising the huge amount of text. If I'd been smarter I would have centralised all location names in one place (which I did but there were way too many exceptions) and made all text easily accessible in external files to facilitate translation into other languages, eg. German.

Live and learn.

Kingdom of Heaven has beautiful artwork on the cards.

Cheers,
Cameron

[Templer_12]

„German and Russian placenames“ - nice idea. [;)]