FreeOrion

I understand that I can change the planets' names. But it should also be possible to change the system's name (or is it?) resulting in the change of the name of all the planets in the system...

How would you rename a planet that has already been renamed when you then later rename the system?

While renaming planets is relatively inoffensive and unproblematic, renaming systems makes things too complicated... or so seems to have been the consensus when this has been discussed before.

Some relevant threads:
http://freeorion.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=5075#5075
http://freeorion.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=21866#21866

Which program can I use to generate a new starnames.txt? Windows Editor doesn't seem to be the program of choice for it doesn't recognize the original starnames.txt correctly...

I don't know what "Windows Editor" is, but it's just a plain text file, with one name per line. Try notepad.

In windows, wordpad seems to do a better job of handling line breaks than notepad does.

I actually use EditPad Lite. It's free for non-commercial use, is reasonably configurable, handles linebreaks properly, etc.

I see the point, but they player should be allowed to name his home system before play starts. It's kind of standard in such games, and probably where the majority of system naming would happen, anyway.

FWIW (i.e. not much) this could be pretty straightforward. If you name a planet, then that takes priority over system name/number, even if you rename the system later.

Thus you could have:
Sol I
Sol II
Earth
Sol IV
...etc

And if you renamed Sol to Banana for some reason you'd have
Banana I
Banana II
Earth
Banana IV

If you want to revert 'Earth' to be called 'Banana III' then this could be handled by reverting to the system/number designation if the planet's unique name is an empty string. Thus editing 'Earth' deleting all characters and pressing Enter would revert the name to Banana III. Or i guess you could also type 'Banana III' into the planet name instead

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I think the biggest reason not to allow renaming of systems is the confusion it could cause it multiplayer games. There are enough stars to keep track of without having their label unexpectedly change.

In another tread someone suggested that each player could have their own set of names for everything, and that the game would translate back and forth for chat. That would theoretically work if the world was full of perfect spellers, but a slight typing error could radically change the meaning of a message. Realistic, but not fun.

IIRC the consensus was that in single player games you could rename to your heart's content, then in MP games it would either be disallowed or be a configurable option depending on whether the people you were playing with were likely to be arseholes or not.

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The COW Project : You have a spy in your midst.

An idea that would work for both single and multiplayer is for players to be able to name systems only when they are colonised, and they can only be named once.

Therefore race A names their new planet 'PlanetA'. Race b who invades and colonises 'PlanetA' cannot change the name.

"Systems" do not equal "Planets". Planets that you own can now be renamed at will and i don't think anyone wants to change that. The name a planet has isn't so important, since it only distinguishes it from at most 9 usually quite distinct planets, asteroid belts or gas giants.

This thread is mostly about changing the name of Star Systems. Since there are fewer kinds of stars and a whole lot more, the confusion that comes from renaming a star system can be much greater.

I mean't planets. In any case, if I ever say systems, it means all planets within, eg in this case naming all planets at once, they would become numbered etc.


How can renaming star systems become confusing?

Err, so what kind of renaming are you proposing?

The renaming of a Star would be a problem only for multiplayer (assuming the AI didn't go around renaming things). With hundreds of stars, and only a few graphics amoung them, the name is what most people are going to latch information on to.

would if be workable to have it so that each player has their own definitions as to what each system is named?

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