I'm on the progress of going through all the words of language_words.txt, making sure their use makes sense, and giving the nouns/adjectives fitting sub-categories. The idea is to give dwarves more sensible random names. I can't do anything about the verbs, which are thrown here and there and everywhere and which most often just don't work at all.
I'm also going to remove few words, so you'll have to generate new world to use the mod. This means that old worlds won't work with the mod, but the generation of a new world also makes all the new words work. At the moment, I've only removed one word and only added one word: AUNT and ANT, respectively, and it will take at least two-three days until I'll finish the mod. I'll try to get it available before the next version.
Any way, here's what I've already learned about words:
Components:
FrontRear the 1Adjective 2Adjective Thecomponent-Noun of Ofcomponent
If a name, any name, has 'the', the front and rear components come before it. These are quite random, and often too random to be cool. The part after 'the' is what's used for the names of embarking groups, civilizations, military squads etc. These often sound pretty good even in basic DF.
Nouns:
Front compound is the first component of a dwarfs' (and fortress's) name, e.g. GRIFFONlancer, SCULPTUREstaff, ORBcrystal. SING stands for singular, PLUR for plural. In my mod, I'll use abstract words, adjectives, words describing colors and materials, and words of iconic creatures and objects as the front components, hopefully achieving names such as Griffonlancer, Speartalk or Windwhispered.
[FRONT_COMPOUND_NOUN_SING]
[FRONT_COMPOUND_NOUN_PLUR]
Rear compound is the latter component of a dwarfs' (and fortress's) name, e.g. griffonLANCER, redSILVER, roundedKNIVES. In my mod, I'll use words describing jobs, long adjectives (roundness, baldness), most of the creatures and objects in singular, plural or both forms, and some adjective forms added to existing verbs or nouns, among others. I want to achieve names like Scupltureborn, Orbhorse, Silverbane.
[REAR_COMPOUND_NOUN_SING]
[REAR_COMPOUND_NOUN_PLUR]
This is the hyphen-component, the noun that comes before hyphen with names such as APES-armor, DRAGON-arrow, SWORD-smith. In my mod, I'll leave most of these out, leaving mostly short words, words describing weapons and probably other types I haven't considered yet. Hyphen combination-words are usually mindless, but they are rare, so it doesn't hurt so much. It can offer very nice combinations, though, so I'll try to put in lots of generic words to hopefully achieve Night-Mountain, Arrow-Apes, Pocket-Angels and similar names.
[THE_COMPOUND_NOUN_SING]
[THE_COMPOUND_NOUN_PLUR]
This is the rear component of hyphenated words, and at the same time the word defined by 'the'. The Bloody ANGELS, The Ravenous Pink KNIFE, The Ageless Winged MACAQUES of Baldness, etc. Even in my mod, most words are available as the basic word, I'll just leave out the ones that are less iconic, like 'artifice'.
[THE_NOUN_SING]
[THE_NOUN_PLUR]
Finally, these tags let the noun be used as the last component of the name, the one after the 'of'. Crusading Toothpicks of BEES, Rivers of BLOOD, Fiery Bog of MERRIMENT, etc.
[OF_NOUN_SING]
[OF_NOUN_PLUR]
-----------------------
Adjectives:
Front compound is the first component of a dwarfs' (and fortress's) name, used as the similar tag for nouns. Instead of Griffonlancer and Scuplturestaff, the names would be something like GOLDENlancer and ANGRYstaff.
[FRONT_COMPOUND_ADJ]
Rear compound is the secondary component of a dwarfs' (and fortress's) name, used as the similar tag for nouns. Instead of Griffonlancer and Scuplturestaff, the names would be something like GriffonBLIND and ScupltureBORN. In my mod, I'm substituting spesific forms of certain verbs as adjectives, to allow e.g. the above '---born'.
[REAR_COMPOUND_ADJ]
This is the hyphen-component, the noun that comes before hyphen with names such as Sword-smith. I'm not sure if I'll make colors and materials available as THE_COMPOUND components in my mod, but the results would be e.g. BLUE-monks and CRYSTALLINE-fortifications.
[THE_COMPOUND_ADJ]
the blind-angel
Here's a funny tag, because I have no idea what it does. The 'dist' could mean distribution, i.e. how often the word appears, or distance (what?) or something else altogether. I haven't gotten far enough with my mod to see any results, but I'll post more as I learn more about this. The values vary from 1 to 5 or even 6.
[ADJ:]
[ADJ_DIST:3]
If you want to add words, you'll have to edit several files:
language_words.txt has list of all words, and contains the above tags that tell DFhow the word can be used. This part is obvious.
language_SYM.txt holds lists that are used in generation of themed names. I think they're mostly used for map generation at the moment. There are words for e.g. deserts (desert, dune and waste), and unless you add your new word in DF won't know that your word has anything to do with deserts.
language_DWARF, or _ELF, _GOBLIN and _HUMAN are the ones modders probably already know about. You'll have to translate all your new words for these languages before they can be used. They are pretty simple files, just lists of words and their translations.
You can't play in an old world if you have removed words that were used in it. Because the worlds are huge, you shouldn't remove any words; even strange words like Planet or Incest are probably used somewhere.
I noticed that there's no posts at all about adding in new words or editing the grammatic rules governing name generation in here, so I decided to get a bit of publicity for myself before I get my mod done. I'm not sure if I'll get on to adding any more new words, but I will try to compose a post about grammatic suggestions that could make the randomization better than it can be modded to be. Even changing verbs so that we'd have "Murderedboat", "Murderingboat" or "Boatmurder" instead of "Boatmurdered" would do a lot. Also, getting rid of both 1st and 3rd forms of Present would be better in most cases (i.e. I chant and he chants), because in most cases it's identical to a similar noun (a chant, many chants), thus causing unnecessary duplication and making some nouns more rare than they would otherwise be.
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Topic: Language modding guide (Read 590 times)