Why do I always see the same pawn names over and over?

Started by Zombull, January 12, 2018, 02:01:46 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Zombull

My name is supposed to be in there somewhere and I expect there are thousands of other player-added names...but I never see them. It's always Sam and Engi and Val and the rest of the usual suspects.

OFWG

Quote from: sadpickle on August 01, 2018, 05:03:35 PM
I like how they saw the naked guy with no food and said, "what he needs is an SMG."

Songleaves

Quote from: OFWG on January 12, 2018, 03:38:38 PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

Nah, I definitely see Val, and Engi, and Sam often as well. Although it's not that big of a deal since it's not like people have unique names in real life either.

Injured Muffalo

I've had Sam and Engi too. More than one Elekio. Et cetera. This was only over a few games.

It seems people think there are far more names than there really are. Or the probability is weighted somehow.
A muffalo encountered a vimp near a patch of sweet vegetables. A struggle ensued. The muffalo gored the vimp with its horns. The vimp bit the muffalo with its beak. Finally, the vimp was bested, sending large chunks of its flesh in every direction. But the muffalo was injured. It shed a single tear.

Kiter5

(1) - maybe player created characters only appear in your game if you say to add them on the option menu.( maybe they don't get to live in the Rimworld forever once created, sadly )
(2) - how does one create their own character?

I think it is kind of funny when my colony gets raided by, for example, Ally the pirate, and Ally the pirate was one of my colonists last game.

(just discovered this game a month ago)

Foefaller

Quote from: Kiter5 on January 12, 2018, 07:20:05 PM
(1) - maybe player created characters only appear in your game if you say to add them on the option menu.( maybe they don't get to live in the Rimworld forever once created, sadly )
IIRC names are suppose to be drawn from random. I get the sneaky suspicsion that names with unique backstories seem to come up more often because the two are exclusive to each other. I.E. anyone can be a Teacher, but only Samantha "Sam" Haxton can be a Bush Sniper.
Quote
(2) - how does one create their own character?

http://store.steampowered.com/app/367680/RimWorld_Name_in_Game_Access/

Used to be able to do backstories as well, but that ended I think last patch? (relative newcommer as well)

Quote
I think it is kind of funny when my colony gets raided by, for example, Ally the pirate, and Ally the pirate was one of my colonists last game.

(just discovered this game a month ago)


Yeah, it's amusing, but sometimes gets annoying when you run into the same exact pirate time and time again.

Songleaves

Where in the code can you find the list of names? As far as I can see it's not in the defs with the other lists of names like animal names and city names.

dkmoo

Quote from: Songleaves on January 12, 2018, 04:16:20 PM
Quote from: OFWG on January 12, 2018, 03:38:38 PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

Nah, I definitely see Val, and Engi, and Sam often as well. Although it's not that big of a deal since it's not like people have unique names in real life either.

They appear to appear more often bc those names are familiar to youbso you tend to remember them more over others.

Dev mode spawn a 1000 pawn pirate and 1000 pawn tribal raid and I'm sure you'll see a random distribution of name generation.

Songleaves

Quote from: dkmoo on January 14, 2018, 01:18:12 PM
Dev mode spawn a 1000 pawn pirate and 1000 pawn tribal raid and I'm sure you'll see a random distribution of name generation.

The game might do checks to make sure that the same name isn't appearing multiple times in a raid, or isn't the same as one of the other current pawns on screen. I just went into Dev Mode btw and created 10 tribal pawns and one of them was Sam and another one was Val.

Kbforss


Bolgfred

I rarely had a Val, but Ace and Lizard are pretty common to me.

All-In-All I think a possible explaination for random names could be the random number generator itself:

AFAIK a computer creates random numbers based on his hardware component. This means, and thats a fact, that every computer got their own scheme on random numbers in every context.
even when these effect is barely noticable, it is possible that a computer gets the same values more often than another does. So its not too unrealistic that some people get haunted by Val, some by Engi and others by Jickslack Johnson the smoking caribu. Anyway, it's probably Apophenia. I'm sorry
"The earth has only been lent to us,
but no one has said anything about returning."
-J.R. Van Devil