After watching a video on town name generation, I figured that the French names were not generated like the English names, but only taken from a very small list. I looked for NewGRFs that would generate fake but believable names, and found nothing. The only NewGRFs I found on Bananas simply had a larger list of town names (which is already a great improvement, especially for large maps). I think random fake names are more funny though, so I started to learn about how to make a NewGRF for city names. I had some troubles with nmlc, so in the end I went low-level and created my own script to generate a NewGRF.« Le train TER numéro 98058 à destination de Pontvif va partir. Il desservira les gares de Sainte-Foy-le-Grand, Saint-Bonnet-la-Ville, Pontbel, Pignanvilliers, Castelvaux, Écailhé, Trauzoc et Pontvif, son terminus. Prenez garde à la fermeture automatique des portes. »
The names it's able to generate are usually small towns. I think it's pretty good already, but I plan to add some more options to generate regional names, like "only names from Britanny" or "only names from Alsace". I think it could be fun
It's available on Bananas
The license is GPL3+ and the source is available on GitHub. Look at generate.py which does all the work, and is heavily commented
To give you a small taste of what you can get, here are a few examples from my current game.
- Saint-Hilaire-les-Lacs
- Pontblanc
- Rirsouls
- Moilhéglise
- Sarnoc
- Saint-Vincent-le-Bas
- Broinvillier-le-Duc
Have fun!