Hunting Down a Naming Scheme in C3/DS
Written onWith the backstory behind my new world complete, it was just a matter of time before the action started in Creatures Docking Station! One detail I nearly overlooked, though, was how everyone was going to be named. Setting up a world also requires a naming scheme, and I was at a loss as to what I wanted to do. Typing in individual names seemed like quite a lot of work, considering that there would be many inhabitants. So I pondered.
I actually recommended Amaikokonut’s Protective Tub when I made a list of recommended underwater agents, and I decided to put it to good use! The wonderful part of it is that its catalogue file can be edited to include all sorts of naming possibilities. I dug far and wide, and finally settled on using combinations of fish families and scientific names. Believe me, they can be very long and unpronounceable! These fanciful names were added as nouns, while I used the names of colors for the adjectives. In total, I ended up with 66 adjectives and 546 nouns. Not too bad! I also made sure to keep the number of characters in the names to a reasonable limit. No 20-character fish names here!
Admittedly, the colors will likely pop up more often than usual with Protective Tub. Yet a test of this new catalogue file made it interesting, and all looked to be in order. There are far more interesting lists for Protective Tub, although I would be happy to make this one available for download. Feel free to leave a comment now, or after some samples have been posted when the Creatures hatch. The good news is that they are just about ready to begin their aquatic lives!
Update: I added on a few more adjectives to describe colors and patterns, so that part of the list went from 66 words to 102 words. That should certainly help create some very unique names!
You might like to check out Mr n_Stuff’s “Say Name” addon.
It adds a small button in the place where the name of your selected creature is displayed and copies it to your hand’s speech bubble – could be useful if you end up with some very long names!
Awesome, Malkin: I never did hear of that before, and thank you for sharing the link! I may try it out, although the Creature Nametags seem to be working out pretty well. Part of the reason why I cut out the really long names was because of how much space those were taking up onscreen. The names seem pretty reasonable in length now, but I will certainly keep that agent in mind if I run into any trouble. Thanks again!
I would love to see more custom Protective Tub lists! I also probably need to finish my old speech bubble mod since sometimes long-named creatures tend to hit the limit when they express hunger for something, heh.
I’m on the fence about teaching these Creatures how to speak… So many annoying features about it at times, but I guess the good thing is that their names shouldn’t be a problem! I haven’t had any really lengthy ones: I think there are a couple of rare instances where the names could be 21 characters, but the majority are under 16 characters. I’ll certainly look into sharing it! Maybe Protective Name lists will also be useful when I post a resource about naming ideas…