Location-based City Names- ideas? help?

[Jwitti]

Okay so I was playing Freeciv, which is a freeware version of civ based off of civ II, and one of my favorite features is how it names the cities you found based off of the terrain around it- so if you found a city in the middle of a desert for some reason, and you're america, it'll be Las Vegas or Pheonix or Santa Fe but if you found one (as America) on the coast near some jungles it'll be Miami. Hills, grassland, coast, and desert? LA of course!

Obviously I was like, "This is SO COOL I wonder if we can get this to work in Civ IV?" and then I realized how difficult it'd be to code -_- so, I have some ideas but I need somebody who actually knows a little about coding to take the idea and run with it.

My idea was to have the map generator give each land tile a code number based off of its terrain and surrounding terrain. Then, in the xml Civilizationinfos file, instead of having the city names as it is now, it has something like terrainnumber0001cityname=New York, then on and on for each (or only the applicable ones) of the possible terrain numbers

Now my first question is, "Is this even possible?"
My second- "is it easy? Probably not..."

 

[platyping]

1) Possible
2) Difficulty depends
3) Tedious because it is useless unless you have an intensive list

 

[Jwitti]

I'll have to look to see if such a list is in the freeciv program files

 

[Jwitti]

So this is how they did it in their files: View attachment american.txt
and here's a download link for the game: http://sourceforge.net/projects/freeciv/

 

[platyping]

Anyway my requirement script is already checking surroundings for various factors such as terrain and hills, so it takes less than 10 mins to adjust it to work for city names instead.

 

[Jwitti]

sweet! I'd be willing to compile a list of city names out of FreeCiv's files, if I had an hour or so to kill.. (like I do now)
do you want it in this terrain-> these city names or this city name in this terrain?

 

[platyping]

If I want to code it, I will just code it to work that's all.
Like all the other xml scripts I made, I will only provide one example that's all.
Can't be bothered to fill in data.

But chances are, I won't be doing any coding from Xmas till New year.

 

[Jwitti]

no problem. Thanks for at least telling me it's possible

 

[el_hidalgo]

Very cool idea. However, not all cities in Texas are near or in the desert! Actually out of the big cities only El Paso is.

 

[Jwitti]

I know that.. you may notice that they have ! before some of the terrain types (ie !forest !jungle for Wichita) meaning NOT near it. And also I think they were thinking a bit macroscopically

 

[el_hidalgo]

I know but the Texas cities don't have !desert. A lot of people have this idea that Texas is just a big desert but that's not the case. Just a pet peeve of mine.

But anyway, if you need data for any civs not in free civ I'd love to help. I will of course fix any other data errors I notice along the way.

 

[pesgores]

There are no deserts or jungles in Europe, what do you make of that for European civs?

 

[Manco Capac]

There are no deserts or jungles in Europe, what do you make of that for European civs?

Some european countries went through the imperialist phase conquering new continental regions. For instance, French Guyana is still a France belonging. It's even a strategic location from where they send their spacecrafts (equatorial regions have least gravitational pull). For others, even if the country doesn't hold the region anymore, it can be used from a historical standpoint.

Otherwise, simply generic names not considering the land feature.

Oh hey, hi Jwitti.