Player Names

[pavansss91]

HI all

First of all The forums looks new and wonderful

Now This post is for discussing about players names in sport manager games.

I have seen some games with player names from all over the countries in the world.
I know how it is done using the first name txt file and last name txt file.

All i need to know is 2 things:
-How is names like Anđelković stored in databases ??
 (I didn't google because i thought this is the best place to find answer for this)
-where can we find such names listed for each country ??
  (I tried to google but couldn't find for this)

Thanks for answering me

[Nox]

1) Imho the best is to use UTF-8 character coding which supports multi-byte characters meaning, that there are enough of room for data of char to represent any character from the world's aphabets ... only downside is that you sometimes need to use multi-byte safe functions for manipulation with data that may contain multi-byte strings, like you can't use strlen for names, but mb_strlen

btw...you might probably want to keep names divided by country...of course someone can have different names, but this way you would have higher percentage of people with names from different countries than from 1 country

[Scion]

yep if you really want international text its UTF-8, but you can cover a lot of ground with just the Western European character sets....

and just to reiterate what Nox said....one really anoying thing is to have to type in characters that are not directly available on your keyboard. So if you are using special chars then either avoid forcing the players to type them in themselves, or allow the players to indicate what language they would like to use.

[wunchot]

-where can we find such names listed for each country ??

When I had to solve the same problem, instead of using a list of names for anyone from each country I managed to find a site listing people who had played the sport from each of the main countries. In my case that was enough data. Might be worth a try.

The other thing to be aware of is that some first names don't necessarily sit well with some last names (Mohammed being a popular Muslim first name and Singh a common Sikh last name - however you wouldn't expect to see the two paired up). I managed to get round this by just using initials instead of first names but that may not be appropriate for what ever game you're working on.

[Doidel]

I hesitated to ask this question for quite a long time, but since a similar thread already exists I'll give it a try:
Imagine an international game which wants it's players to choose "realistic", "valid" fantasy names.
What if this game would restrict the available range of characters to english letters, excluding numbers, with the goal of forcing the players to choose such names? Would this be of any use?
And could you recommend other/further possibilities? (e.g. make it part of the game rules)

Thanks in advance for your answers
greetings
Doidel

[Scion]

If you have a 'Role Playing' heavy game then that might work, you could tie it into the character generation and character background, giving the player a persona that they need to play too...you were born to such and such parents they gave you the name blah...you worked as dingsbooms untill X

but most games including RPG's are heading towards more and more Player Generated Content and Player/avatar name is probably one of the simplest ways to start introducing Player Generated Content.

[karnedge]

I hesitated to ask this question for quite a long time, but since a similar thread already exists I'll give it a try:
Imagine an international game which wants it's players to choose "realistic", "valid" fantasy names.
What if this game would restrict the available range of characters to english letters, excluding numbers, with the goal of forcing the players to choose such names? Would this be of any use?
And could you recommend other/further possibilities? (e.g. make it part of the game rules)

You could have the it in the rules to have a realistic valid fantasy name when creating your character. Otherwise, use preg_match() to make sure a user only uses alpha characters, perhaps use it also to make sure they dont use any bad words, and maybe even use ucwords(strtolower()) to capitalize the first letter for each name and lowercase the rest so you dont get crazy all caps names out there.

My suggestions (although I'm not even sure you were even asking to be that technical)

[Doidel]

Hi and thanks for your replies

These are both very good ideas.
Though thinking of "Baron Ulomar the 3rd", which would be a valid name in my eyes, would be prohibited by most of your solutions.
And having to allow each new account depending on wether there’s a valid name or not could get quite annoying…
Maybe limit the use of numbers to 1 number per name?
And did someone make negative experiences with allowing all characters? Or are these rather rare cases?

Regards
Doidel

[pavansss91]

I think I am going to make a list of names from every country.
I know it is waste  of time but i don't know what else to do

The above method of asking the player to give his own names if not so good if we want to have a realistic sport manager game
as the players can name their player as "Baron Ulomat The third"
here they didn't use numbers but u see how odd it looks having every player named "Baron Ulomat the ...th"

[Crazy-T]

I hesitated to ask this question for quite a long time, but since a similar thread already exists I'll give it a try:
Imagine an international game which wants it's players to choose "realistic", "valid" fantasy names.
What if this game would restrict the available range of characters to english letters, excluding numbers, with the goal of forcing the players to choose such names? Would this be of any use?
And could you recommend other/further possibilities? (e.g. make it part of the game rules)

You could have the it in the rules to have a realistic valid fantasy name when creating your character. Otherwise, use preg_match() to make sure a user only uses alpha characters, perhaps use it also to make sure they dont use any bad words, and maybe even use ucwords(strtolower()) to capitalize the first letter for each name and lowercase the rest so you dont get crazy all caps names out there.

My suggestions (although I'm not even sure you were even asking to be that technical)

Yeah, same as i would do. preg_match(); strlen(); ucfirst(); strtolower(); or preg_replace() anythink that aint A-Za-z0-9 -_ @..