I've come to the realization that I spend almost as much time picking good names for my ships as I spend designing them, which leads me to think that I want some quality of life improvements to the "Select Name" functionality.
1) The theme list is incredibly long, which is awesome, but which makes it tough to navigate. We should have an option to set some naming themes as "favourite", so they'll appear together at the top of the list. (This should be done per-game, not per-install, so that people can have different RP for different campaigns). Also, an automatic "All favourite themes" combined list, so we don't need to go back and forth between them.
2) Names that are already in use should be marked. We should also have the ability to mark names in a theme that we don't want to use. Perhaps (*) for names in use, and (**) for names we've told it to skip.
3) I want a button that gives me a new on-theme name, although it should skip (*)/(**) names. I do *not* want the VB6 behaviour where I press "Next name" a couple dozen times on my first design and then all the names from the theme are marked as used and not available in future. Ideally, if we have several favourite themes marked, it'll pull names from all of them.
4) You've got corporate names for a lot of things. I'd like the option to add corporate naming themes, and ideally the ability to set which corps get used for which equipment. The big functionality difference here would be that corp names *can* be re-used, so we can have both an "Alsadius Industries EM Sensor EM5-40" and a "Alsadius Industries Thermal Sensor TH5-40", and the same corp name could get suggested for both.
5) I'd love to have the option to use the same naming tool we have now for ships to name ground units, missiles, and the like. The names of those do tend to have descriptions on them too ("Ares Main Battle Tank"), so I want the ability to mark a name as used manually, because otherwise "Ares Main Battle Tank" would not show "Ares" as used. But if the skip function from #2 is there, that's probably enough.
6) A search function would be kind of handy. Low-priority, though.
I know this is low-priority, especially while things are still in bug-squish mode. But it's nice to think about.
@Steve: If you're reading this, would a mod that accomplishes this be the sort of thing you'd approve? There's only like a 5% chance of me actually making one, but I figure I might as well ask.
