Belgian town names

[Hamilton2007]

I don't think there is an Belgian set allready. So i made a list of Belgian City's and town's, are here some coders around who feel like making an GRF of it, please

Edit: Let me know if the list is to short.

[FooBar]

It would be cool if the Walloon town names were used at one side of the map, and the Flemish at the other (I didn't see any German town names while going through the list real quickly).

[Hamilton2007]

I took this list of Wikipedia when searched after Belgian City names, the black ones at the bottom on the list are the ones in my province, Limburg.

I once made a scenario with the Biggest Belgian city's in their geochraphical(hm, spelling???) order.

[FooBar]

Nice, I'll check that scenario out some day.

And for the spelling, try geographical

[DaleStan]

And for the spelling, try a spell checker. Spell-checkers are available for all major browsers. And if you can't install one for some reason, Google will happily spell-check for you.

[Ammler]

It would be cool if the Walloon town names were used at one side of the map, and the Flemish at the other (I didn't see any German town names while going through the list real quickly).

region based NewGRF would not just be fine for town names, also other sets like road, terrain, houses etc. could use such a feature...

[PaulC]

One Belgian Town Names grf, based on the list posted above. I had to remove Le Rœulx (no œ character in the game so it was coming out as "Le Rulx") and Ottignies-Louvain-la-Neuve (must have been too long or something), plus a few duplicates, which leaves a total of 152 names. Enjoy!

[FooBar]

There's an œ in OpenGFX. And in plain OpenTTD as well if you use a custom font. You even could provide the œ character yourself in the town name grf!

Other than that: well done!

[PaulC]

There's an œ in OpenGFX. And in plain OpenTTD as well if you use a custom font. You even could provide the œ character yourself in the town name grf!

I'm a TTDP user myself, but I'll look into it. Cheers!

[FooBar]

My bad, didn't spot a difference from the screenshot so I mistakenly assumed whatever I'm using myself.

But then providing the character yourself in the grf also applies to TTDPatch, so that might be a solution that works for all! I can provide you with whatever we put in OpenGFX, then it's just copy/paste to put it in the Belgian town names grf as well!
EDIT: There is this license issue though: using bits from OpenGFX requires your grf to be GPL licensed as well... I can provide the code though, as that's fully my own work and therefore I can do whatever I like with it.

[Hamilton2007]

Thanks Paul!

Will you upload it to bananas?

[PaulC]

Will you upload it to bananas?

That's something else I'll have to look into, since I'm not entirely sure what bananas is. I'll certainly list it on grfcrawler, though.

[FooBar]

Bananas: http://content.openttd.org/

[ProDigit]

Whoa!
It even has my birthplace in them!

The only thing missing is a Belgian scenario and/or heightmap, and a belgian train/tram/truck set!

Love it!

[OliTTD]

Hello,

I know it is bad to undig an old topic, but I don't see the point opening a new one concerning a very specific (and limited) subject, ie Belgian town names.

So:
I wrote a new Belgian town names set which contains all 589 municipalities. All of them, it's exhaustive. It's based on lists from the (Belgian) National Institute of Statistics and from Wikipedia.

The use of languages being a (over?) sensitive subject in Belgium, I tried to remain as "language-neutral" as possible:
- The Flemish, Walloon or German origin of the town names is respected (ie displayed respectively in Dutch, French and German).
- Brussels is either displayed as Brussel or Bruxelles. The same goes for the 18 other municipalities of the Brussels region (officially a bilingual region).
- If the wrong language version of a municipality is used, then it is an honest mistake. Report it and it will be fixed.
Oh yes, one last thing about this language thing: the municipalities with facilities (the Belgians will know what I'm talking about) have absolutely NOT been taken into consideration: they receive the name of their geographical location, and that's it (Sint-Genesius-Rode, Comine-Warneton, …).

This has been written for OpenTTD with NML 0.2.1, no attempt whatsoever has been made to make it TTDPatch compatible, I don't even know what it would imply (I don't even have Windows...).
For instance, I didn't have any problem with œ in Le rœulx and in Belœil, nor did I have any length problem with Ottignies-Louvain-la-Neuve.

In the .nml, the towns are grouped by region and then by province, just in case further development of the town_names-block syntax would allow to take advantage of this information. This sorting doesn't show up in the game, though (except perhaps with selection frequency, but see 2. hereunder).

I attach my work so far hereunder, it works alright but it is not finished. Feedbacks most welcome!
And this leads me to NML questions:

1. you can define parameters in town names GRF, but can you actually use them ? if-blocks within town_names-blocks are not allowed, nor the opposite. switch-blocks the same thing. An "obvious" (ie intuitive) text(string(STR_TOWN_NAME_BXL), 1) doesn't work neither (with the STR_ being defined in the various .lng files of course).
The idea behind testing the language is to avoid multiple entries in the town names menu. Or to be able to play with towns from a specific province or region only.

2. The selection frequency (?). I'm am not sure, but I think the number that follows the town name (text("Brussels", 1)) indicates how often it will be selected compared to others. I don't understand fully how this works. Could someone please point me in the right direction? I could'nt find anything in the doc.

And, finally, a more basic question:
If this set is considered good enough to be published, should it exist in addition to the existing one or should it replace it ?

[FooBar]

1. I think you can get only as far as basically combining multiple versions of you town name grf into one grf, where the parameter defines which version is used.

2. The number behind the name defines the probability that a name is chosen. I don't think I can explain it better than this: http://newgrf-specs.tt-wiki.net/wiki/NM ... ames_parts

Other than that this seems to be a nice grf! I'll make sure to test it in my next game!

[lawton27]

For 1, I'm not sure if this exactly what you want but a GRF can define as many name sets as it likes, see my Olympic town names GRF for an example, you can download the source code from the thread, feel free to take a look: http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?f=67&t=55338

[PaulC]

By strange coincidence I have just this afteroon finished coding the official update of this grf...

[OliTTD]

@FooBar:
thank you for the link, now I understand how it works, it's easy enough actually

@lawton27:
that is exactly what I did, but I limited myself to two Belgian entries in the town names menu (FR+NL) whereas you didn't hesitate to have six Olympic entries. I hesitated to develop the same principle for this set, because I could easily create 14 entries: to play with all country names (1), with each region (3), with each province (10). I think this is too much, and if I could have been able to use parameters and to test them (obviously), then the user would have chosen his/her preferences and there would have been only one entry in the town names menu, which is neater.

@PaulC:
Oops… What do we do? Shall we work together? Merge the sets? Compare functionalities? Discard one set and keep the other one?

[PaulC]

@PaulC:
Oops… What do we do? Shall we work together? Merge the sets? Compare functionalities? Discard one set and keep the other one?

Well, I'd been thinking about an update for a while, already had a list of names and started coding last night... what are the odds of that, eh?

As for what to do, there's no reason why there can't be more than one grf for Belgian town names - there are three each for German, Czech, Japanese, Welsh and Spanish, and no less than four Russian town name grfs. On the other hand, since I also based mine on a list of municipalities I suspect it won't be much different to yours, though I'd have to have a closer look at what you've done.

EDIT: The main differences are that I left out the City of Brussels, used only the French names for the other Brussels municipalities (though I think half of them are the same in both languages anyway) and added four names to the Flemish list; otherwise the main bulk of my name list is the same as yours.

As such I only have one main Belgian set, but also two smaller sets for just the Flemish and Walloon names. IMHO it wouldn't be worth doing each region seperatley because each set would be relatively small, it would only be worth doing if you had a larger, more comprehensive list of all Belgian towns and villages, and that's not something that I personally have much interest in.