[Development] City Name Suggestions

This is the thread to suggest city names for tiles on the new map. In general, it should proceed in a similar way to terrain change suggestions for the map itself: limited to a particular region on the map and preferably illustrated with a screenshot and reasoning if necessary.

As I have mentioned in the map development thread, I have made some changes to the city names module, and all the new code is in CityNames.py (the old CityNameManager.py is still there fore reference, containing all the old maps and renames). Obviously all of that is still in the map branch. This is what you should know about the new implementation:

1. City names are no longer in the Python file, instead you can find them in Assets/Maps/Cities.csv. I suggest to open this file with a spreadsheet editor like Excel or Calc, who easily support opening and saving CSV files. If you open it as a text file directly, it will look very similar to previously though. I have also added some tooling to edit the file from inside the game, more on that later. Also it's important to know that the file itself has full UTF8 support, so there is no need to escape special characters. However, we are still limited to the usual Latin-1 character set.

2. Just to be clear, there is now only one map that is used by everyone regardless of language.

3. Translations of city names are still in CityNames.py, and they are currently empty. Those translations are not in the scope of this thread. I want to develop the city name map first, and after it is complete introduce translations for its city names.

4. It is possible that the same tile can have multiple valid cities on them that are actually different cities and not just different names for the same city. Examples for this are Babylon and Baghdad or Carthage and Tunis. In this case, the map should contain the oldest of these cities. I have also introduced data.dChangedCities where a change of the city on the tile can be tracked. For example, when Arabia acquires Babylon, something like this would be coded somewhere:

Code:

data.dChangedCities[u"Babilû"] = "Baghdad"

For the purposes of this thread, it means you should include the oldest city on the tile in your suggestion, but make note of any other city to replace it.

5. Similarly, the game keeps track of city name changes (different from genuine city changes), i.e. when the name of a city changes within the same language. For example Chang'an to Xi'an or Byzantion to Konstantinoupolis. These are tracked in a similar way in data.dChangedNames, but none of this is really relevant for this thread. I have also made some preparations to handle names changed based on era and civics in particular.

6. I think it's always better when each tile has its unique name. In some deserted areas, that is not really possible. Using the same name for a 2x2 area is valid in such situations, but never more (because it means duplicate names)

7. Some city names exist multiple times in different locations (e.g. York in England and York in Canada, or Córdoba in Spain and Córdoba in Argentina). We don't have to worry about that just now.

8. For the name entered into the cities map, it should always be in the language of the oldest native occupant of the city. This may be an "independent" language, for example Yerushalayim for the Jerusalem tile. Note that native means that French language names should still be used for the area of France even though it was occupied by Rome with Roman names for most of its cities. There is of course some degree of judgment here.

Suggested process for making a suggestion

The best way to make a suggestion is use the ingame tooling I have recently added. The basic idea is that you can edit the city names map by placing landmark signs on the map. You can do this by opening the Python console by pressing Ctrl + ~. Then once per session you have to enter:

Code:

from MapUtils import *

Afterwards you have two operations available:

Code:

loadCityNames()

This loads all city names in Cities.csv and displays them on the map as landmarks. For example, it looks like this after loading the current file:

Spoiler :

This is helpful to see the existing city names for reference.

Code:

saveCityNames()

This conversely saves all landmark signs currently on the map to the Cities.csv file. If a tile is empty on the map but already has a name in Cities.csv, the existing name is preserved. So it basically overwrites only the names that are set on the map.

There will also be another file written named CitiesDiff.csv. It will only contain the landmark signs currently displayed in your game, without the names already previously existing in Cities.csv.

Preferred suggestion format

1. Do not load the city names from Cities.csv beforehand (if you used them for reference, close and restart the game again to clear it)
2. Include a screenshot of the map with the city name signs
3. Include the generated CitiesDiff.csv file that includes the names from the landmark signs

This is more useful to me than displaying all city names on the map, or including the Cities.csv file with all names, because it makes it easier to see the differences in your actual suggestion, and to merge suggestions from different people into each other.


With that, go ahead with your suggestions!

 

Oh, and @LacsiraxAriscal I'm explicitly tagging you here because I know you've been working on this, and I want you to be aware that suggestions have started.

 

But not for me. It's really helpful to see everything on the full map to take the terrain into account when seeing the city names.

As I briefly mentioned above, changed city names are added to the dictionary once they happen. This is a more explicit and less tedious way to keep track of city name changes than in the previous implementation, where it was only persisted through the names of the cities themselves. They need to be in stored data so the information is persisted after the game is saved and loaded again.

I didn't get any, maybe try a clean pull first.

 

Your characters look messed up in those screenshots.

 

Can you correct this?

Have you first run the "from MapUtils import *" line?

Do you have a different keyboard layout than English QWERTY?

 

I don't think it should be necessary to change the code. Did you edit the CSV file manually? Maybe the encoding is off on your end? The file is Latin-1 encoded, like the game itself.