Affecting newgen names (basics)

[mannyhams]

After perusing a number of threads[1][2][3] on the topic of affecting newgen names I'm struggling to resolve some of the conflicting assertions I've seen, as well as to generalize some of the use-case-specific advice out there.

So I'm hoping we can nail down some basics here?

1. The name pool for newgens of a particular nation may be extended by adding a person of any type (player, referee, journalist, anything) with that nationality to the database
2. A name need be added to the database only once (by way of #1) for that name to be used for nation-specific newgens
3. Retired persons still affect newgen names, such that if you were to add a large number of very old and inconsequential persons (e.g. 80-year-old referees[4]) their names will continue to be used for newgens in perpetuity

I'd very much appreciate your reply if you confidently know the above to be true or false!

 

Use case: Ethnic balance for newgens in Zealand & co's new USA tiers database

Currently, USA-based regens are heavily Latino, which is appropriate for the real world. However, the fantasy presented by this database is one in which the USA has gone mad for soccer at all levels, and in such a scenario one would imagine there to be a better balance of ethnicities participating in the sport.

So my idea was to manually extend the database by adding a couple hundred player names from other major American sports leagues (NFL, NBA, Hockey, Baseball). Given my current understanding, I could achieve this by adding a large number of old referees to the database to affect the newgen pool while minimally affecting the rest of the FM simulation.

[1] 

 

[2] 

[3] 

 

[4] No offense intended to 80-year-old referees

 

Edited September 17, 2021 by mannyhams
typos

[Wolf_pd]

I have run a test once where I removed every single person (not just player) from the database.

1. Names are taken from two places, the database and a namelist we can't access (this is the file mentioned in [3]). The database is the first option, the namelist since it is not as big as the database only adds minor amounts.
2. Certain nations have a namelist, certain nations do not. The largest nation (football wise) have a namelist, the smaller ones don't. The USA does have a name list, as far as I could see.
Certain nations do have a namelist, but rather small, so at the same time will be get newgens with names from the language (New Zealand an example of this)
In the case a nation does not have a namelist, there are several ways the newgen names are determined.
This differs per Nation and is something that can only be determined via test. Things I have seen are, determined by language, determined by local region (Basque Country an example), determined by continent region (this seems to happen in Africa), determined by continent (this seem to happen in Oceania).

[mannyhams]

Thanks for this!

So IIUC it sounds like you can affect a nation's newgen names by adding persons from that nation to the database, regardless of whether or not a nation has a name list? If so, that partially resolves question #1 in the original post.

[Wolf_pd]

2 hours ago, mannyhams said:

So IIUC it sounds like you can affect a nation's newgen names by adding persons from that nation to the database, regardless of whether or not a nation has a name list? If so, that partially resolves question #1 in the original post.

Correct.

You can even affect a nations new games by removing persons from the nation (sometimes I did for a mod by moving people between nations). So changing US-Mexican players to Mexican-US would have effect as well.

[mannyhams]

1 hour ago, Wolf_pd said:

Correct.

You can even affect a nations new games by removing persons from the nation (sometimes I did for a mod by moving people between nations). So changing US-Mexican players to Mexican-US would have effect as well.

Awesome, thanks for sharing! I may have a go at this in the next week or two for FM21, but definitely for FM22 when that comes out in Nov. After simming a season or two I'll report back here WRT the other assertions from the original post.

[Prokopije]

Also, name added to database can't be removed from name list. If you add XY to database and than later delete him, you will still have XY name randomly appearing in game. Only way to remove it is to start game without fmf file where he once existed.

[mannyhams]

4 hours ago, Prokopije said:

Also, name added to database can't be removed from name list. If you add XY to database and than later delete him, you will still have XY name randomly appearing in game. Only way to remove it is to start game without fmf file where he once existed.

Ok neat, this seems to confirm assertion #3 from the first post?

If so, that means only assertion #2 and half of assertion #1 (player names drawn from any and all person types added to the db) remain unconfirmed. Thanks for chiming in, very useful stuff!

Edited September 17, 2021 by mannyhams

[Prokopije]

17 hours ago, mannyhams said:

Ok neat, this seems to confirm assertion #3 from the first post?

If so, that means only assertion #2 and half of assertion #1 (player names drawn from any and all person types added to the db) remain unconfirmed. Thanks for chiming in, very useful stuff!

#1 is truth. I've been adding all kinds of persons, all end up as future regens. Also keep in mind that if you add female persons (journalists or whatever) those names will be used for creating future players, so you'll end up with bunch of males with female names.

[Wolf_pd]

There is probably something in the software that can set a name not used for newgen, but this is not possible from the editor.

[Prokopije]

Cause they hide all good stuff from editing. Totally user unfriendly game for significant customization... If somebody played Morrowind and did some editing there, than knows what a good editor is. Should have something like that for FM...

[Wolf_pd]

1 hour ago, Prokopije said:

Cause they hide all good stuff from editing. Totally user unfriendly game for significant customization... If somebody played Morrowind and did some editing there, than knows what a good editor is. Should have something like that for FM...

If you have seen FM20 Iron Curtain, you know I would disagree

[Prokopije]

1 hour ago, Wolf_pd said:

If you have seen FM20 Iron Curtain, you know I would disagree

That is "football-ish" editing. I'm more about editing stuff like those name lists, editing dialogues, adding new conversations, adding new media questions and answers, changing some variables, creating new continents, etc...

[Wolf_pd]

6 hours ago, Prokopije said:

That is "football-ish" editing. I'm more about editing stuff like those name lists, editing dialogues, adding new conversations, adding new media questions and answers, changing some variables, creating new continents, etc...

I am with you, looking at every option to be able to influence newgens, new countries, continents, etc. No luck (yet), but I will keep prodding the database for more.

[Mars_Blackmon]

I just wish that Hispanic Americans come with Americanized names instead of a name you would see in Mexico with special characterizations.

 

It should be Jose Guzman instead of José Guzmán

[Wolf_pd]

1 hour ago, Mars_Blackmon said:

I just wish that Hispanic Americans come with Americanized names instead of a name you would see in Mexico with special characterizations.

It should be Jose Guzman instead of José Guzmán

If you change that in the pre game editor, it would already change.

[Mars_Blackmon]

3 minutes ago, Wolf_pd said:

If you change that in the pre game editor, it would already change.

Wait how? By changing the player?

[Wolf_pd]

Yes, by changing his name and changing the é into e and á in a.

A large part of the names are picked from the database.

[Fredrik]

Isn't this because the  names are picked from the Mexican names? I have an older version of the game but there it's obvious that the game does not recognize the majority Hispanic areas of the country such as Rio Grande Valley or many parts of Southern California. 

[Sead Muratic]

My Indonesian db, which needs very specific newgen names for many regions, looks really bad. I tried with associating language with cities, regions, utilising defunct countries etc. and still no luck, it's still all over the place.

Any advice?

P.S.:

And it's a completely fictional db where I deleted every Indonesian from the db and replace them with about a thousand new people with more regionalized names.

Edited September 25, 2021 by Sead Muratic

[Wolf_pd]

Question in that case are, which languages did you set at nation level, how are teams divided over the various regions?

Also, which language(s) did you use and which defunct countries? 

[Sead Muratic]

Bahasa Indonesia is the only languages I use that has 100 percentage for national level. The other 28 (I forgot how many of them I created) are tied to regions or cities. But disappointingly they do nothing to influence regen names. Papuan names still mixed up with Javanese or Balinese names for example.

So I tried tying them to several defunct countries like Borneo Malay, Burma, South Vietnam etc.. and change the nation of the regions or cities associated with each language to those countries, but still no luck, so I changed them back to Indonesia since it only complicated things.

Edited September 26, 2021 by Sead Muratic

[Wolf_pd]

Hmm, that's similar to what I did in the Soviet Union. For me the issue was mainly the amount of teams in the republics which caused the names not come up in the teams as there were relatively few teams active in the competitions in the republics.

[Sead Muratic]

I'd appreciate if you can tell us when you have any future finding from your Soviet league about what stuffs actually control the newgen ethnic names. It seems to be only simple when an ethnic portion in a nation is a major ethnic group/language of other nation with enough names, but when the ethnic group/language is only exist in that nation, languages don't seem to influence anything, created ethnic names from a region with unique language are not taken into consideration.

[themodelcitizen]

Starting to think some of the extinct nations like SEA Chinese, Singh Indian, Malay Indian etc exist only to provide hidden namelists for newgens in certain regions. Assuming that's right, do we know which extinct nations don't come with namelists? Gotta be Ireland pre-1922 and maybe "Upper Volta" or others like that which seem to exist only for history entries in competition histories?

[Wolf_pd]

41 minutes ago, themodelcitizen said:

Starting to think some of the extinct nations like SEA Chinese, Singh Indian, Malay Indian etc exist only to provide hidden namelists for newgens in certain regions. Assuming that's right, do we know which extinct nations don't come with namelists? Gotta be Ireland pre-1922 and maybe "Upper Volta" or others like that which seem to exist only for history entries in competition histories?

East Germany and West Germany don't have a namelist as far as I know. They always take over the names from the players added to the pool.

Commonwealth of Independent States should be good as well. Burma and United Arab Republic as well I thought. Same for Upper Volta and Zaire.

Soviet Union has a language set, so might have a namelist somewhere. South Yemen has a language as well. Same for South Vietnam and Yugoslavia. 

[themodelcitizen]

Which makes CIS perfect for my additional San Marino nationality in my Sammarinese DB, lol, great workaround but I'm quickly running out of free slots. I think we could get to the 16 for the Island Games but it would be very tight (there's a cool Manx DB on here that could possibly be compatible). St. Helena, Falklands etc would be fun too, but likely have no existing players in the DB.

Alderney are interesting as I added, like, one guy to the name pool, so it's still pulling whatever default names it has.

[Wolf_pd]

SI should add more nations to the history. Saarland, Dutch East Indies and such are still missing, so we should be able to get some extra options.

[maverickt]

Hello, I've come across this thread while searching to solve a very similar issue!

 

I've edited San Marino to replace them, and create a new nation called "Canary Islands". They're basically taking over everything that has local region Canarias.

 

So I changed every San Marino national to be Italian, and removed all of the cities. I then added all of the cities from the Canaries to the country, and added "Canary Islands" as the nationality of all of the players who should have it.

 

However, when I try to load players into the game, probably 80% of them have Italian names and about 30% have Italian as a second nationality. I've checked, and the only language is Spanish.

 

This seems to suggest that it's hard coded, as surely it would just pull from the pool of around 600 names that are currently tagged as Canary Islands names?

 

Any help is much appreciated!

[themodelcitizen]

Have you changed the Canary Islands' "region" to the same one as Spain? And make sure to set the "language" of each city, the local region Canarias, and the country of Canary Islands to Spanish

[maverickt]

Yep, all cities only speak Spanish, and the Canary Islands are based in "Western Europe"

[Wolf_pd]

There are two probably issues.

The 30% second nationality Italian is pretty sure hardcoded. Looking into the data I can see that a lot of San Marinese in the original database have the same
The second one, those Italian named players, are they greyed out?

[themodelcitizen]

5 hours ago, maverickt said:

Yep, all cities only speak Spanish, and the Canary Islands are based in "Western Europe"

Does the local region have a language? And the country itself? That might only affect last names mind you

[ak717]

19 hours ago, maverickt said:

Hello, I've come across this thread while searching to solve a very similar issue!

 

I've edited San Marino to replace them, and create a new nation called "Canary Islands". They're basically taking over everything that has local region Canarias.

 

So I changed every San Marino national to be Italian, and removed all of the cities. I then added all of the cities from the Canaries to the country, and added "Canary Islands" as the nationality of all of the players who should have it.

 

However, when I try to load players into the game, probably 80% of them have Italian names and about 30% have Italian as a second nationality. I've checked, and the only language is Spanish.

 

This seems to suggest that it's hard coded, as surely it would just pull from the pool of around 600 names that are currently tagged as Canary Islands names?

 

Any help is much appreciated!

I'm in a similar situation, i'm using a database that inludes a playable extinct nation (yougoslavia) that regroups all nations from ex-yougoslavia and 100% of the newgen have only kosovo sounding names somehow (idk why specifically kosovo)

tried many thing in the pre game editor to make them have various names from the different countries that form yougoslavia but nothing seems to work

I have already checked all the languages in regions nations and cities and tried several things but couldn't figure it out yet

[themodelcitizen]

On 12/01/2023 at 04:56, Wolf_pd said:

SI should add more nations to the history. Saarland, Dutch East Indies and such are still missing, so we should be able to get some extra options.

Saint Pierre and Saint Barts are also usable, they don't participate in anything (I guess Reunion and Mayotte too) so could be changed into any nation where you don't mind a default French namelist (wonder if we can overwrite that with a big enough pool of added people). I used Saint Pierre for Quebec in FM22

EDIT: I'm sure you're aware, but from what I can tell, a country's "region" (Western Europe, etc) affects the first names of newgens, while existing people with that nationality (including created 100-year old referees) make up their last names.

I wonder if the issue @ak717 had has something to do with SI coding Albanian and Kosovar names for the "region" Southern Europe (so they can share them, and from a time when Kosovo didn't have enough people for a namepool of its own), while the other "Southern Europe" nations (Bosnia, Italy etc) have their own hidden namelists, or are set so that their "language" takes priority.

If no "region" is set, I think it might pull first names from other nations with that "language" or from existing people with the nationality as well, this needs more testing (including with a blank slate of people).

Further, it appears that the skin tone/ethnicity of greyed out players/newgens relates to their "continent", but I'm guessing most nations have this hard-coded somewhere (along with first names, and in some cases last names).

Is this consistent with what you've seen with Iron Curtain and other projects?

Edited January 27, 2023 by themodelcitizen

[Wolf_pd]

11 hours ago, themodelcitizen said:

Saint Pierre and Saint Barts are also usable, they don't participate in anything (I guess Reunion and Mayotte too) so could be changed into any nation where you don't mind a default French namelist (wonder if we can overwrite that with a big enough pool of added people). I used Saint Pierre for Quebec in FM22

EDIT: I'm sure you're aware, but from what I can tell, a country's "region" (Western Europe, etc) affects the first names of newgens, while existing people with that nationality (including created 100-year old referees) make up their last names.

I wonder if the issue @ak717 had has something to do with SI coding Albanian and Kosovar names for the "region" Southern Europe (so they can share them, and from a time when Kosovo didn't have enough people for a namepool of its own), while the other "Southern Europe" nations (Bosnia, Italy etc) have their own hidden namelists, or are set so that their "language" takes priority.

If no "region" is set, I think it might pull first names from other nations with that "language" or from existing people with the nationality as well, this needs more testing (including with a blank slate of people).

Further, it appears that the skin tone/ethnicity of greyed out players/newgens relates to their "continent", but I'm guessing most nations have this hard-coded somewhere (along with first names, and in some cases last names).

Is this consistent with what you've seen with Iron Curtain and other projects?

Pretty much spot on.

With regard to St Pierre and St Barts, the only issue I would expect there is that close to all newgens would get a French second nationality.

[themodelcitizen]

2 hours ago, Wolf_pd said:

Pretty much spot on.

With regard to St Pierre and St Barts, the only issue I would expect there is that close to all newgens would get a French second nationality.

If you replaced them with a fully functioning nation maybe. But when I just made the "local region" of Quebec part of the new nation of Quebec (formerly Saint Pierre) it gave all Canadians born in Quebec a Quebecois second nationality (as intended).

Need to test to see if it acts similarly if I just change a city's nationality (not local region) to the new one. I think it would work, I can't imagine every newgen being born with 2 second nationalities, but we'll see

[Wolf_pd]

4 hours ago, themodelcitizen said:

If you replaced them with a fully functioning nation maybe. But when I just made the "local region" of Quebec part of the new nation of Quebec (formerly Saint Pierre) it gave all Canadians born in Quebec a Quebecois second nationality (as intended).

Need to test to see if it acts similarly if I just change a city's nationality (not local region) to the new one. I think it would work, I can't imagine every newgen being born with 2 second nationalities, but we'll see

Ah, of course. In this case you added the Local Region to Nation Quebec in the style of the Basque Country. That will only create a Second nationality and will ignore anything else the Quebec nation will hand you. I was thinking of using St Pierre for a Quebec nation for FM32, but I would have to remove the Second Nation France (already have an idea for that and the French will hate me for it...).

[themodelcitizen]

Maybe New France persisted in the 18th century and are still united with the old country (either as a Republic or surviving Empire)? Montreal, Chicago, New Orleans all the spine of the new Francophone country but I digress, maybe something to work on in the future. As I keep converting extinct nations to active ones and seeing what breaks (and doesn't), I'll keep updating if anything interesting comes up

[Wolf_pd]

6 hours ago, themodelcitizen said:

Maybe New France persisted in the 18th century and are still united with the old country (either as a Republic or surviving Empire)? Montreal, Chicago, New Orleans all the spine of the new Francophone country but I digress, maybe something to work on in the future. As I keep converting extinct nations to active ones and seeing what breaks (and doesn't), I'll keep updating if anything interesting comes up

Oh no, much worse (for the French that is).

[Fredrik]

On 27/01/2023 at 03:08, themodelcitizen said:

EDIT: I'm sure you're aware, but from what I can tell, a country's "region" (Western Europe, etc) affects the first names of newgens, while existing people with that nationality (including created 100-year old referees) make up their last names.

 

Why wouldn't a nation use the first names of created staff/players/whatnot?

Could you tell me what you tried to get that result?

[themodelcitizen]

I don't think it's set in stone. For North America, or the local region Southern Africa, I've noticed first names being pulled from a wider pool instead of my created namelist. With continent set to Europe, though, they seemed to pull first names from the namelist like you've described

[Wolf_pd]

28 minutes ago, themodelcitizen said:

I don't think it's set in stone. For North America, or the local region Southern Africa, I've noticed first names being pulled from a wider pool instead of my created namelist. With continent set to Europe, though, they seemed to pull first names from the namelist like you've described

Which probably has to do with the level of detail European data has. I expect the level of data for Europe and South America being quite high, while for North America, Africa, Asia and Oceania it will be much less. For some specific nations (SI Nations and the bigger nations on a continent) the quality will be better, but take, say Djibouti and I am pretty sure if you remove all players and change the language to Dutch that you might end up with Dutch names.

[themodelcitizen]

On 27/01/2023 at 06:09, Wolf_pd said:

Pretty much spot on.

With regard to St Pierre and St Barts, the only issue I would expect there is that close to all newgens would get a French second nationality.

Just realized Saint PIerre clubs also get randomly thrown in the Coupe de France (which is great), so better not to touch them unless you want to rebuilt that too. The same isn't true for Wallis and Futuna or St. Barts, though

EDIT: adding nations to Europe seems to work fine so far, with only UEFA U21 qualifying affected (even if the nation isn't set to be part of FIFA). I'm guessing that tournament will just "get teams from europe" without a hard number like the Euro and the U19s, so two qualifying spots are open in the first instance (both co-hosts of the 2023 finals not participating) and then just one after that (back to one finals host).

I'm not sure if these free spots are distributed via highest rep, or if a further high-rep created team would take the spot of San Marino or whoever's at the bottom.

This was all done without creating clubs though, I'm not sure what would happen to coefficients and CL qualifying if there are clubs in the "nation" (not just "based nation") that it can pull from.

Africa seems fine, their national comps aren't affected, and I *think* same goes for North America (their namepool is all kinds of messed up for custom jobs though). South America causes an error if you add an 11th nation, one of their youth tournaments must just pull "all teams from South America" or something like that and would need to be rebuilt

Edited January 30, 2023 by themodelcitizen

[Monsi9958]

I have created a nation "Corsica". In order to have players with an Italian surname, I added the Italian language (even with 2%) BEFORE the other languages (even if their importance is much higher). Result: the newgens have Italian surnames. On the other hand, I don't know how to have at the same time first names which are in conformity with the Corsican reality, i.e. either French or Corsican. On this subject, even if you can add new languages in the editor, this has no real influence on the game. I also regret the absence of certain language families or groups. For Brittany, I created the Breton language but the category of Celtic languages (of which Welsh and Irish are part) does not exist.

[themodelcitizen]

If you add like 100 people, who can be 100-year-old "officials" and inactive (I think), with Corsican nationality and birthplace, it will influence the name pool. I wonder if that would interact with the Italian thing to get a nice half and half balance.

[Monsi9958]

OK. I'm happy with the Italian surnames, but it's the first names that don't fit.

[themodelcitizen]

Try adding 100+ people to the namepool with French first names and Corsican/Italian surnames. My method has been duplicating an official, giving them all the new nationality and birthplace, wiping the rest of their details, and making them 100 years old. I believe the game won't actually use them as refs anywhere.

[fresca]

I traded Kazakhstan for Afghanistan and Yemen for Israel. People, languages, cities, etc. were all exchanged, and eventually, Kazakhstan newgen came out in changed Afghanistan, and Israel newgen came out in changed Yemen. Is this hardcoded?

[Wolf_pd]

If you exchange them, you are using the base nation Afghanistan and Yemen. That base nation always takes presidence.

[Fredrik]

I added Romansh to the languages and have created a few players and staff. I created a few villages where they are a relatively common and set the language to Romansh. Obviously none of the teams created players used these names. 

What's more is that I looked at a few other players and the three first had names that didn't exist in the database... The names were Vonnez, Fontannaz and Angliker. All were supposed for newgens from St Gallen, i.e. German-speaking. 

 

I have seen that the standard is that players have Italian as their primary language and can speak both French and German if their city of birth isn't set. I'm not sure Region does anyhing since everyone without city is set to have been born in the German -speaking Bern region even though their own language is Italian. 

This is for FM22 and my own Level 6(so far) custom database.