Real names

[vometia]

I'm not marking this one as WIPz/RELz considering my history of not getting stuff out... maybe the reverse psychology will do the trick! But at the moment it's really just a curiosity, unless anyone's specifically interested in it.

Even though I'm pretty much done with FNV for now, one thing that I found a bit irksome was the generic names that so many NPCs used: did they really have to call everyone NCR Trooper and the like? So I wrote a random name generator: it's neither especially intelligent nor efficient, but hopefully does the job, and to make it work I've compiled lists of male and female forenames and some surnames, around 200 or so of each (no, I couldn't think of all of these myself and used the assorted boys'/girls' names websites as a source).

So my idea is to use Wrye Flash's export facility and use a text-editor to change the lines as follows:

"NPC_","FalloutNV.esm","0x116829","VStreetNCRTrooperCFa","NCR Trooper"

so it becomes

"NPC_","FalloutNV.esm","0x116829","VStreetNCRTrooperCFa","Trooper %"

(fortunately some text editors make changes of this sort on every line quite straightforward) and then my program comes along and replaces the "%" with a random name each time it comes across one. Then I use Flash again to reimport the amended file.

So far so good, but there is of course just one problem, which is identifying the male and female NPCs: I could of course not bother and just use surnames, but I'd like to give them a bit more personalisation if I can manage it. Does anyone know of an easy means of doing so, whether through Bash/Flash or in TES4Edit? I know that Geck separates the male and female records but I'm not sure if there's a way of selecting a whole bunch of them and saying "write these to my new plugin". Many of the records are identifiable by having format such as the above where the "CF" part means "Caucasian female" but not all of them do and it could be a rather time-consuming process.

Obviously this isn't a high priority mod given that I've just said I'm pretty much done and, well, it isn't high priority; but I am curious as to whether there's a short cut or if I have to do it the hard way...

[vometia]

Aha! Figured it out; well, I've figured out one method anyway: still a bit time consuming but far less than the alternative of going through every record.

In brief, it involves going into Geck, expanding every race record, then going through all the subrecords for one sex only. Select all of the NPCs in the whichever male/female subsection you're doing, right-click, select "toggle auto-calc" or "toggle quest-object" - doesn't matter which, the purpose is just to flag the record as updated so it can be written to a temporary plugin which will be deleted in a moment anyway. Then the plugin can be selected in Flash and the names exported. Once you've done one sex, repeat the process for the other, though preferably using a different temporary plugin name so it doesn't overwrite the first list you did!

I can't help feeling there's most likely an easier way, but I haven't figured it out yet.

[vometia]

Seems like I still need to take care: levelled characters are a special nuisance as I just discovered by testing it out in the BoS bunker, which was having a bit of a case of "hi, I'm Dave Smith and so is my wife" as I found about half a dozen Dave Smiths of either sex wandering about the place. I guess I'll have to either find a way of excluding levelled characters (which will mean an awful lot of them, thus rather missing the point) or find a different approach.

Edit: it looks like checking the "use base data" box may be my saviour, though I suspect that unintended consequences lie in that direction; apart from the fact that if I'd ever released this, I'd hoped to do so as a text file rather than a plugin...

Edit 2: it also transpires that my list of ~200 surnames is nowhere near enough, so I'll have to find a source of new ones.

[vometia]

Seems that once again I've been far too ambitious and/or optimistic regarding the ease with which this might occur: perhaps rather than starting with everyone and working back, I might be better off adding NPCs in batches as I move from one area to another so I don't get overwhelmed checking to see whether or not they reference a levelled list; and even assuming no problems with the "use base data" box, depending on how a template is referenced it needs to be flipped either on or off, so there's not even a hard-and-fast rule I can rely on there either.

Still, something is better than nothing at all, so I may as well do what I can.

The next thing is naming conventions; the easy ones are, well, easy enough: "Brotherhood of Steel Scribe" can become "Scribe Matt Hills" and "NCR Trooper" can become "Trooper Alice McDonald" for example, but others are less amenable to an obvious answer, at least to me: things such as "Fiend" and "Card Dealer" I'm not so sure about; I reckon either "name (description)" or "name - description" is most likely the best format. I don't want to lose the description altogether, especially for those of us who are snipers so that we can get some advance warning that we've just killed the wrong target! Though some people may think that replacing the description in its entirety with just a personal name is an improvement, so that's something else for me to think about.

[vometia]

Bah. Something else I never thought of, but out of a levelled list of a dozen NPC templates, I suppose the chances of three occurrences having the same template appearing more than once isn't that insignificant, as I just found; and having two identical NPCs in the same area with the same name is a bit weird.

Sigh. It was a nice idea, but unless I want to distil out the "generic but unique" NPCs (as much of a contradiction in terms as that may sound) it's starting to look like it's not such a great idea after all. Shame, really, because having unique names does genuinely make them feel more individual, even if they just have the same old dialogue.