Hidden Skirmisher feature: Mod-specific shipnames

[Arparso]

I don't believe I ever documented this, so its probably about time now

The Skirmisher comes with a list of default shipnames, which it'll offer to the player in the drop down menus. The player can also enter his own names, of course.

If there is no name specified by the player, the Skirmisher will randomly select names for the ships from that list.

However, this list can be overridden by your mod by supplying your own list of default names!
To achieve this, create the following folder and file inside your mod's directory:

_nsconfig\shipnames.ini

It's a simple text file, similar in format to Nexus' other ini files. Here's a sample, defining two possible shipnames for each civilization:

Code: [Select]

CIVILISATION 1
Trafalgar
Coriolanus
CIVILISATION

CIVILISATION 2
Andromeda
Mirage
CIVILISATION

CIVILISATION 3
Urobach
Armaros
CIVILISATION
You can have up to 512 shipnames and should supply at least 20 total. If you include less than 20 shipnames, the Skirmisher will add some of the default ones to your shipnames list until there are 20. This is simply because the Skirmisher needs to be able to give each ship in both fleets a name... since there is a maximum of 10 ships per fleet, it needs no less than 20 names - simple as that.

The names can be grouped by CIVILIZATION, matching the ids in your races.ini. The Skirmisher will completely ignore this grouping, however, as this was only a planned feature for future versions and never actually implemented.

Still, it's a useful feature for supplying the player with a selection of names better fitting into your mod's universe and setting, so you may want to add this to your mod.

[jstubbles]

Will the grouping be supported in the next Skirmisher release at least?

Thanks for the info btw. This helps a lot.

[Arparso]

I'm not actively working on a new Skirmisher release at the moment, so it'd be silly of me to talk about potential features of hypothetical future versions. It's probably a good idea to do this sort of grouping anyway, though, because it might eventually become a supported feature at some point in time.

I just wanted to point out this "hidden" feature, partially because I nearly forgot about it myself and just went looking for it in the original source code. The last Skirmisher version was released 6 years ago, so my memory was a bit fuzzy about that