Hi Folks, Time to take a laser like focus on a single aspect of the game that with three of minor tweaks could be made close to perfect. Star Names The first problem with them is that there is no easy way to change the defaults for the game. If the star names were taken from a text file, it would allow for purests like myself to substitute real star names, or to customize them to a particular language or culture. The second problem is that the number of characters is not that large. Star names should be at least 20 characters in length, while planet names should be 24 characters in length (20 + 1 space + 3 for roman numerals assuming you don't go over 7 planets). In addition there should be a boolean indicator with each planet name. That boolean would only be set to true if a human player has changed and saved the planet name. Now for the final improvement. If a user changes the star name, all the planet names in the solar system that have their booleans set to false would change in unison with the star name. So if you change "Vu" to "Vega" and you already changed the third planet to "Terra Nova", then it will stay "Terra Nova", but "Vu IV" becomes "Vega IV". These changes would help modders, language localization, and make the behavior easier for users to customize without having to change every planet name in a solar system themselves. These changes should not be too hard, though Unity is not a modding friendly system. It likes to store data in the most user unfriendly manner. Final note, the text files should be in UTF-8 format, this enables the use of Unicode characters and thus can be fully customized to a user's language. Just make certain the rendering engine is also using a full UTF-8 character set so it can display the characters correctly. This may sound a bit odd to English speaking Windows programmers but is second nature to Linux programmers. À Á Â Ã Ä Å Æ Ç è é ê ë Ø ۲ گ ß õ (as you can see, the website uses Unicode characters)
I like that, the ability to change star-names yet still retain individual planet names if desired. It would enhance immersion for sure.
We are taking the star names from a text file, we've just not exposed the file yet but we can certainly do it at a next opportunity. Current star names max length is 12 chars. We realize it isn't much, the reason is one of presentation. Having stars with 20 chars in the starmap may be a bit too much, but we can see how many additional chars we could squeeze in there without the starmap filling up with too much text. Perhaps 14 could be a good compromise? We'll see. Regarding planet names, it's 12 chars + 1 space + 3 for roman numerals max at the moment. The reason was also one of presentation. However, the system view has changed dramatically since PA10, so perhaps we can add a few more chars to planets as well. We'll see what we can do. That's a great suggestion, and it should be easy to implement. We took note of this and we'll make sure to add it in a next opportunity. Thanks for the tip on going with UTF-8 character set. It makes total sense and we'll make sure to check that when we expose the text files to modders.
