[Mod Request | Idea] Pawns named after people from your social networks.

[ambivalence]

Probably, it's a mad idea, but it came to me suddenly and I've decided to share it here with you guys. What is the point: it's really simple to scrape our social accounts to take an info from them. For example, it could be some simple python script to get all the data (names of our friends or one step beyond: friends of our friends). Why not to create some application that build xmls with this kind of information, so these pawns will encounter in the world of rim? I can write the gathering script, but I don't know how to implement it into the game.

I think it's kinda fun. Any ideas how to build these xml/predefined pawns? It also would be great to have a modified UI layout to insert photos or links to those people.

[ajaviide]

There was an plugin i used to extract names to use in xcom(unknown) from facebook.
http://kotaku.com/5974582/now-you-can-recruit-your-facebook-friends-to-fight-and-die-for-you-in-xcom heres an article about it. It does not recognize genders tho.
You just need to find a way to feed the names in to game

[ambivalence]

Hah, that's funny. Thanks for your reply on it) Gender is pretty easy to extract – don't know why that guy had a problem with it. I think it won't be that immersive when you encounter some male friend with female gender. It will remind you that it's just a game, just a flaw in some mod you're using. So, I could rewrite it, but... yeah, I don't know how to implement it in the game. It also important to mark them as special pawns, so they won't be erased from the world having higher chance to be met.

[dburgdorf]

While it isn't its main purpose, my Editable Backstories mod allows you to add full and/or partial names to the game's name databases. If you have no interest in editing backstories and *only* want to add names, well, it wouldn't be terribly difficult to throw together a stripped-down version of the mod. 

[ambivalence]

Tell me what is the xml structure needed, dburgdorf, and I'll try to make it) Will it be possible to higher the chance to meet them in-game?

[dburgdorf]

If you grab "Editable Backstories," you'll see the XML structure in the example NamesDef file.

In that mod, I actually tried to keep the chance fairly low of custom added names appearing, as I didn't want them all "front loading" into characters created right at the beginning of a game, though the chance of custom names being chosen does increase as the number of custom added names rises. (In other words, if you only add one custom name, the chance of it showing up is low, to prevent pretty much every game from using it very early, but if you add dozens of names, the chance of seeing some of them in any given game is noticeably greater.) But that's certainly something that could be tweaked in a names-only variant mod, or perhaps even in "Editable Backstories" itself.