Topic: getting little things to behave, like ship names. (i.e. is it possible?)

[Sartonius]

Anybody else run out of good names for your ship?  Wonder what your ship's real name was supposed to be other than the first two or three names that the system gives every ship you ever buy, no matter what class??

I remember back in SFC1, when you "bought" a ship, it gave it a proper name from a list of names appropriate to ship classes.  If you were playing Fed, it took that one step further by even having logical NCC registry numbers.  (e.g. if you bought an NCL, then the first one is the NCC-1500 Kearsarge.  If you buy a CAR, then you're likely to get the NCC-1707 Hood).  Etc.

So, I know that there are lists of ship names in SFC2 because in the skirmish spacedock it will randomly assign a name from such a list to your ship.  It's in /Assets/Strings/shipnames.txt  Unfortunately when you look again it's picked a different name, and the name it gives you in the battle doesn't match anything you saw or changed in spacedock.  So, in the D2 engine, why does it not give your ship a logical name any more?  Why is it when you get an AI wingman, the name of the ship doesn't match what it ought to either?

It just doesn't make sense to me why such a feature would be "included but not included" in the game.  The best you can do now is to look at the text of that stock file and pick an appropriate name for the hull class yourself.  But surely we can do better than that!  

[RJHJ]

Are you saying that the game changes the names of your ships after you've already changed them? That's odd. What version are you running? I've always been able to change all my ships names and never have had the computer change the name of it.

As for AI ship names, I don't know if it can be done to assign them proper names. Would be nice though.

RJHJ

[FatherTed]

Well, I can't help with assigning AI ship names, but if you're looking for just a registry of ship names for class and race, I have an SFB module that gives the names for literally hundreds of vessels for all the races. Wanderer is compiling the Feds right now. Some classes are incomplete, since so many were built and lost at a rapid rate during the General War, but most include the hull number for that extra special customizing. As time allows, we may try and do all the races. Just be warned that there are so many that this may take awhile. But if you absolutely have to have your favorite ship with a real name, just holler, and I'll be happy to look it up for you(and for a small extra charge, you can get the ship history for many of them ).  

[Sartonius]

Well, my point was it was a seemingly simple feature:  the game gave "appropriate" default names to ships you would buy.  Now it does not, it gives an unfailingly "stupid" name to the ships you get, usually the same name to all of them.  I was just wondering if anybody knew why that was a problem.

As for the shiplist, it's easy enough to simply open the "shipnames.txt" file, scroll down to the class of vessel you want, pick a name and/or NCC number and then enter that as your ship name in the dynaverse engine.  

Or look in some of the stuff my friends have lying around related to SFB.


But this all comes back to the "random" nature of SFC, I suppose.  We don't have fleets like we should.  If I was to make a game like this, I would do it differently:  every starship in service, human or AI, would be a part of the fleet inventory database with characteristics, a unique name, a unique "score" you could keep, etc, a location, repair status/destroyed status, etc.  Then add new ships to the inventory based on the "order of battle" instructions/guidelines as time passes.  Fairly straightforward.  Has problems of its own, of course, and would require a different game design, but, c'est la vie.