FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

Those villages created by Nores mapgen ought to have names! The same applies to the mobs AdventureTest adds to them.

Names of real villages follow certain schems. Some of it could be applied to Minetest villages, but not all. In general, the village generator has no real idea about the sourroundings of a village and cannot select a really appropriate name according to landmarks. Landmarks may still be used for these random names though. Suffixes used for villages vary by region and language.

I know how to do such a name generator in general, but I don't think I'll be able to do it in English in a convincing way. I'd be glad if a native speaker could help out with what patterns and names might fit and which would sound too strange (funny is ok to a degree).

I'd like to help with regard to English placenames. I studied languages for a few years.
I should point out, though, that "English" placenames are frequently derived from languages other than English.
I can also help out with French and Polynesian placenames

spootonium wrote:I'd like to help with regard to English placenames. I studied languages for a few years.

That would be great!

spootonium wrote:I should point out, though, that "English" placenames are frequently derived from languages other than English.
I can also help out with French and Polynesian placenames

And I know what would be convincing names for German villages. Together, that ought to be enough to come up with something where people might not shake their head too much :-)

Is there any pattern we might build on? In Germany, villages in one area will frequently share the same suffix. There'll be other names amongst it (probably settled at other periods of time), but a whole bunch of names will have something in common. For our MineTest villages, that might be less helpful, and most of the suffixes cannot be applied to English names. At least not directly.

Naming villages after people is also a bit problematic.

Good idea, worldwide there are many cute 'sub'-words that are found in city names, as a simple experiment could just randomly select one and add a generated nonsense word before of after it.

As paramat suggests, the simplest way to implement placenames would be to build a table of "sub-words" that sound okay together, and then assign a (more or less) random combination of 2-3 of them for each spawned village.

Unfortunately, places are usually named after prominent physical features of the landscape. The "sub-words" *-burg(h), *-borough, and *-bury refer to a "hill fort", for example. It might be possible to poll mapgen data (temperature, humidity, sea-level), or village spawning (some algorithms seed villages near certain features) to make inferences about the landscape surrounding a village. That's the "smart" option, but it would take lots of work, as I am discovering while trying to design a per-biome procedural music composer module.