[Planet Names] Noctis - original and varied

[zach]

I'm sure some of you have played Noctis, or at least know what it is (a procedural galaxy exploration simulator/game of sorts).

I usually keep all the various omgspace games connected in my head (EVE, Gratuitous Space Battles, AI War, Homeworld etc.) and kind of wish I could just take the best of each and mash it together and somehow convince myself that such a game wouldn't suck.

Anyway, I really liked the Star Wars planet name list but found it lacking in ... uniqueness or whatever. I miss a bit of variation in the NATO/Greek list, as well - and it's difficult to tell the difference phonetically between Psi Xi and Xi Psi

Noctis has long been using a (somewhat dated, yet functional) user-catalogued starguide which has just had its first update in quite a number of years. There have been no naming conventions bar avoid real-life stuff, so there is a lot of variation in that catalogue - exactly how I would imagine a decentralisationally colonised galaxy would have come up with entirely different naming schemes for their local space.

I figured I could pull the planet/star names from this Noctis "starguide" (it's really a somewhat inaccessible binary listing) to have a massive, varied, original human-written planet list for AI War. So I did.

It was a bit of a pain to properly format the data, since the stars and planets are catalogued ALLCAPS, and I wanted every single name to have capitalisation as originally intended. I hacked a ruby script together which takes care of that to a satisfying degree in my opinion. As an example, TWIN-08 stays the same, but TWINS-08 becomes Twins-08. Roman numerals stay all-caps, of/the/and are not capitalised, most other combinations are though (there are exceptions). This parsing and formatting process was more involved than I anticipated, but it's all done now.

Anyway, I shouldn't be bothering you with this wholly irrelevant backend stuff.

I took the liberty of removing most of the immensely repeated names (there were over 2850 variations on Askew <identifier>, for example - that's more than 10% of the planet names). The naming is still there, but instead of having Coral II-01 through Coral II-8Q, I just had the script remove n-10ish variations of each of these repetitions at random, lest every game would have five different Askew planets.

The star names (noctis-stars.txt) have been separated from the planet names (noctis-planets.txt); I have also made full list of planet and star names (noctis-all.txt) in case you can't be bothered copying one into the other. Apart from some stars having Star in their name, there's nothing wrong with using the consolidated list for even more variation.

Download:
noctis-planets.txt (23717 unique names in 250,132 bytes) - yes, Felysia is in there as well.
noctis-stars.txt (6352 unique names in 66,807 bytes) - same goes for Balastrackonastreya
noctis-all.txt (30069 names in 316,939 bytes)

Install:
Name the file altplanetnames.txt and place it in AI War/RuntimeData/, I guess? Steam; "C:/Program Files/Steam/steamapps/common/ai war fleet command/RuntimeData/"

Example naming (pretty much all the names have varying yet logical styles):

[x4000]

Very cool!  Awesome first post, and welcome to the forums.

[zach]

Thank you, and thanks for the welcome

I had been meaning to get into AI War for a while, and now a few days ago I finally did.

I played one game (a six-hour game against an easy AI), and went straight for the expansion and the DLC.

Great job!

[x4000]

Many thanks, glad you're enjoying it that well!

[Winter Born]

Thanks for the list and welcome to the forums

[Mánagarmr]

Seriously coolm although I have to say that some of these names are even more unpronouncible than the originals

[zach]

Grel Vreunarlya is an excellent example. I didn't make the list for pronounceability (technically I didn't make the list at all, just changed its format).

A map usually has so few unpronounceable planet names that it is viable to either describe it as 'The Unpronounceable', or try to say the name anyway (it'll be the only name you're in doubt about, thereby no doubt after all) - or if all else fails and you can't live with a planet you can't pronounce, rename it

There's a lot more data in the noctis starguide than just the planet names. I think it would be interesting if we could have/add flavour text to planets to roleplay things up a bit. Then again, the tooltips are already more or less as packed as they can be.

Thanks for all the welcomes

[Mánagarmr]

In spite of its inpronouncibleness, it's an epic and awesome list of names. And you just gave me an idea for an improvement. *runs off to Mantis to make a suggestion*

[Elukka]

Oh man... I played Noctis a long, long time ago... I can see some of my stars/planets on that list.
Cheers for doing this. It's a great list.

[Giegue]

I like this, but some of the names are just downright silly. I mean, stoplight VIII? invisible shadow?

[PineappleSam]

I'm sure some of you have played Noctis, or at least know what it is (a procedural galaxy exploration simulator/game of sorts).

Checking out Noctis now, but your link

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http://ttp://anynowhere.com/ links me to a corprate website of sorts

TTP is a technology and product development company. We work in partnership with our clients to bring new products to market, creating new business from advances in technology. As you will see from this site, we develop and commercialise diverse technologies and products across a broad range of market sectors.

Googling takes me to wikipidea, which gives me

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http://anynowhere.com/.

Is that the website?

[Giegue]

common sense can be applied to a variety of situations in order to arrive at the answers you seek on your own.