Transport Tycoon Forums

Hello,

From the first version of Transport Tycoon for MS-DOS, there are some issues with the french town names.

I'm not sure about the other countries town names, thought.

The first bug it about the town "Beaujolais".
I'm living myself in the Beaujolais province, and I can say there is no city with this name. Historically, the capital of beaujolais was Beaujeu, and now it's Villefranche-sur-Saône.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaujolais_(province)
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaujolais (more complete, but in french)

The second bug is about the town "Marseille".
This is the second city by size in France. And in TT it's misspelled "Marseilles".
There are two Marseilles in the USA, but none in France...
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marseille
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marseilles

I didn't took time to check all the names, but many of them sound actually very strange (misspelled or unknown).

Also, the choice of the city names is strange, as there are many small cities, mostly from north west of France, and most of the big cities are not present.
I know a GRF can do the job to replace the cities.

But for people discovering OpenTTD now, it's quite confusing to see a game with "real" town names... that are not real.

Is there a chance for the cities shipped with the standard game could be fixed (at least only existing cities and correctly spelled) ?
I could check for the entire list of french cities.

For all we know, this is exactly how Chris Sawyer wanted it.

I think the proper thing would be to release a NewGRF with proper real city names in French.

I think with French town names that come with the game, it's names in a French style or that are French sounding. It is much the same with English names I believe but you still occasionally get real or almost real names.

Here's an idea Eddi proposed on GitHub:

IMHO we should create a method to hide the "legacy" townname generators (so they can only be used when loading old games) and supercede them with new ones

https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenTTD/pull/7654

there's basically two main reasons why i made that suggestion:

1. we can't really make changes to the existing townname generators, as they are needed for loading older savegames
2. many of the old town name generators are inadequate, like having too few possible names for large maps

being able to deprecate (and hide) the old townname generators means we can keep the old code around, while also being able to make actual changes.

the next question would be whether all new townname sets should be NewGRF-based, or do we also keep the possibility to include "internal" generators with the game.