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Should AI Aide support non-English alphabet symbols for naming?

Yes
No

Author Topic: Alien Name generation  (Read 4751 times)

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Offline Erik L (OP)

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Alien Name generation
« on: May 05, 2015, 03:50:01 PM »
To expand on this.

Currently the very prototype name generation in 1517 accepts a pattern. This pattern is then used to generate a readable (but not necessarily pronounceable) name. An example is Xyhuax. I can expand this to include IPA characters representing sounds not normally found in English. The major problems I see are display and readability. Some thing like this could be displayed ?yq.?an, but that is not very readable. I could also display that as Rryq'an, but that does not necessarily bring out the proper pronunciation.

The plan is to set up one or more patterns for naming aliens. This would be used when creating non-player races, though it could be utilized by players who wish to play a non-human race. I will also include a numeric scheme for machine type races.

Offline boggo2300

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Re: Alien Name generation
« Reply #1 on: May 05, 2015, 04:44:57 PM »
I like a good glottal stop in my alien names!
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Offline Erik L (OP)

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Re: Alien Name generation
« Reply #2 on: May 05, 2015, 04:49:15 PM »
I like a good glottal stop in my alien names!

The biggest issue with a glottal stop is how to represent it? Apostrophes cause no end of headaches when combined with a database.

Offline boggo2300

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Re: Alien Name generation
« Reply #3 on: May 06, 2015, 04:32:30 PM »
Unicode 0294  (hex) is the actual symbol (an enlarged curly apostrophe according to Wikipedia)
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Offline Erik L (OP)

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Re: Alien Name generation
« Reply #4 on: June 16, 2015, 03:47:26 PM »
Sort of a adjunct to this...

One thing I was contemplating is randomly generating a language for a race with some common words. Until your race gets full communications, the messages would basically be gibberish.  I'd probably limit the wordset to start. Words like spaceship, laser, die foul human. The usual.

Generating a word list is fairly simple. I'm doing that for alien names and race names as it is. Extending that to words is easy.

Hmmm Maybe what I need to do is come up with a dozen different sets of rules. Then mix and match between them I.E. conjugating uses set 2, plural uses set 6, sentence structure is set 3. That might be random enough to simulate what I want.

Mindless rambling follows:

As the player increases their understanding of the alien language (it runs 0-100%) I'd like to substitute out English words for the alien. Of course that means more tables in the database.

Offline boggo2300

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Re: Alien Name generation
« Reply #5 on: June 16, 2015, 05:04:18 PM »
that would be seriously cool, though I could see it becoming quite a size increase for the database if you have too many NPR aliens
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Offline Erik L (OP)

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Re: Alien Name generation
« Reply #6 on: June 16, 2015, 06:16:14 PM »
I'm looking at a modified Swadesh list. So it's only 100 or so entries per race.

Offline JacenHan

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Re: Alien Name generation
« Reply #7 on: June 16, 2015, 10:12:46 PM »
This looks to be coming along nicely. Looking forward to using it!
 

Offline MarcAFK

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Re: Alien Name generation
« Reply #8 on: June 17, 2015, 12:07:18 AM »
Inb4 steve when?
But seriously I would love some more Indepth diplomacy from aurora, just some dialogue for flavour.
" Why is this godforsaken hellhole worth dying for? "
". . .  We know nothing about them, their language, their history or what they look like.  But we can assume this.  They stand for everything we don't stand for.  Also they told me you guys look like dorks. "
"Stop exploding, you cowards.  "