Quote:
Originally Posted by erik.ootp
If there are any questions on this file I'll be happy to answer as good as I can. I don't know anything about modding OOTP though, so don't ask me about that  |
Thanks, Erik, for dropping in to explain some of the "behind the scenes" work on the names.xml file. I have just one question, regarding this:
Quote:
Originally Posted by erik.ootp
not having multiple records with the same name, but different language ids no more.
|
Why exactly is that an advantage? Let me give a very prosaic example. In version 22, I could determine exactly how many names were in any nameset. Since the names were grouped by ethnicity/language ID, all it took was to count them, starting with the first and going through to the last. And if there were too many names to count manually, I could always copy and paste the csv names into a spreadsheet.
Now, with a single entry belonging to possibly multiple namesets, how can I determine how many names are in a nameset? I can't just transfer the xml entries into a spreadsheet, because that will, at best, only show me which names are unique to a nameset. For instance, the first_names.txt file had 265 first names for the Australian (28) nameset. If I go into the names.xml file and sort them by language ID, however, I get only 10 Australian first names. But those are just the names that are
unique to the Australian nameset. There are lots of other names that belong to that nameset, but how do I know how many there are?
That may seem like a pretty pointless exercise. I mean, who cares how many names are in a nameset, right? But for a modder like me, it's actually fairly important. I want to know how many names are in a nameset because: (1) I want to know which namesets are small so that it makes sense to enlarge them; and (2) I want to know what difference I've made by improving a nameset. Take a look at
this post to see what I'm talking about.
That's just one point where I don't think "reducing redundancy" actually improved the names files. It's not the biggest point, but it at least might give you some insight into the modding process.