Advanced Name Generation Plugin (Scifi and Contemporary too!)

Community Marketplace
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I’ve long been a fan of the excellent name generation tool called The Everchanging Book of Names. In addition to generating “good” quality names, it also allows the user to add additional name “languages” (called chapters in EBoN parlance) with their own language rules for generation.

Unfortunately, EBoN is difficult to purchase (no PayPal) and there’s no SDK for getting names within external programs.

After a decent amount of research into advanced name generation techniques, I’ve come up with a plugin for generating names of a similar quality to that produced by EBoN, but now accessible in UE4 and other programs.

The package would include:

  • The UE4 Plugin, allowing C++ and Blueprint generation of names based on a “codex” (chapter)
  • A UE4 based GUI for generating names and making new codices.
  • Standalone program for generating names and creating new codices.
  • A number of default codices for making names in popular styles for fantasy, modern day and scifi.
  • Plugin is a wrapper library so that source builds are supported, all plugin interface code is public to plugin customers.

I’m thinking about $10-15 for the package.

Is this something people would be interested in? Also note that it’s not relegated to fantasy names, contemporary or sci-fi names are also possible.

Here’s a look at the standalone program (UE4 UMG GUI will look the same/same functionality).

Updates:

  • Advanced Formatting
  • Automatic Settings Save/Load

Here’s an example of using the advanced formatting to generate names in the format S’L (shortname apostrophe longname).

Updates:

  • Multithreading
  • Advanced Formatting/Templates

Advanced formatting - these are basically “templates” for name generation. L represents one long name, S one short name, and the other options are a hyphen (-), apostrophe (’) or space. Default combos are provided in common configs.

To generate “Firstname Lastname”, L S is a good combination. You can also do things like S-S L or S’L S, for more complex fantasy names.

To use this, just select the part you want in your format (L, S, apostrophe, hyphen or space) and click the + button. Once you’ve got your format looking how you want it, click the > button to add it to the list. To make the generator use it, check the checkbox. To clear a format, press the X.

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If it will generate cool names heard in LoTR, Diablo, WarCraft, also cool sci-fi names and even normal human names from different epochs - I am in! :slight_smile:

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Take my money :slight_smile:

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What kind of price point were you thinking?

teak

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Probably $10-15.

6

Quite fair…

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Sounds cool! I’m not working on anything fantasy at the moment but in the future I may. I’d pick it up for that price without immediate need.

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It’s a bit buried in the original post, but I want to restate that the plugin can be used to generate names of any genre theme, including contemporary and scifi. It’s all about what names you give it as a starting input (with rules/constraints, the set of input names is called a ‘codex’).

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exactly my thoughts, if…

do you provide a codex?

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I’ll be providing a number of default codices. I plan to supply several codices for each genre theme (fantasy, contemporary and scifi).

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Now that’s value.

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Updates:

  • Multithreading Support
  • Advanced Formatting/Templates (see below)

Advanced formatting - these are basically “templates” for name generation. L represents one long name, S one short name, and the other options are a hyphen (-), apostrophe (’) or space. Default combos are provided in common configs.

To generate “Firstname Lastname”, L S is a good combination. You can also do things like S-S L or S’L S, for more complex fantasy names.

To use this, just select the part you want in your format (L, S, apostrophe, hyphen or space) and click the + button. Add as many as you want. To clear a format, press the X. Once you’ve got your format looking how you want it, click the > button to add it to the list.

To make the generator use it, check the checkbox. You can check multiples to have it generate using all the templates you’ve selected, as well.

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Btw, is it going to be only for Editor and the plugin will not be required to be included into dev/release builds?

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The “plugin” part of it will just be a wrapper over my DLL (this is so I can use it in my C# standalone app too, and to support source builds), so you can make it work for Editor only, but if you want it to generate names at runtime, you’d need to include it.

For sure though I’m going to support generating lists of names and saving them in data table or csv assets for use at runtime, as I see that as a common use case (the name gen isn’t free performance wise!).

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In that case, is Android (and consoles) going to be supported ?

Will you also include a BP node to read from those .cvs files? :o

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I’m using standard C++ features, so it should work, but I’ll need to test as I haven’t really done much with Android.

That will be done in the standard way, but I’ll include an example, sure.

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Updates:

  • Advanced Formatting
  • Automatic Settings Save/Load - This is big, as it means you don’t have to “prepare” the program every single time by loading a name list and setting the settings you want, by saving out the state of all the relevant controls.

Here’s an example of using the advanced formatting to generate names in the format S’L (shortname apostrophe longname).

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Cool! Btw, is there codex for Japanese / French / German names (and ability to mix names from different languages) ? I was watching an anime the other day and found characters’ names pretty cool. Kinda mix between Japanese and German names/last names.

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Check out http://generators.christopherpound.com/ for a bunch of name lists you can use as codices, including some of the ones you want there.

I do want to eventually support multiple codices for generating a single (compound) name, such as having a first name codex and a separate last name codex. I will be adding support for that a little bit later.

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So, what happened to this project ?