Additional station names

[3iff]

I've just released a grf to provide extra station names for the JGR patch pack. This allows many more names for stations before lapsing into "station #number" mode.

The logical extension for this is to do the same for industries. Currently just one station built near to an industry can get a default name ie. "Happyville Forest" but other nearby stations get non-relevant names. I see that a station can 'know' of nearby stations...but how difficult would it be to have a newly built station to pick one of perhaps 6 names relevant for that industry?
I find the single 'nearby_station_name' a bit restrictive.

I know that different industry sets have their own names for various industries, so that's one problem.

The JGR mod uses EXTRA_STATION_NAME_FLAG_TOWN_CENTRE etc. Is something like EXTRA_STATION_NAME_FLAG_INDUSTRY_FOREST a possibility, and would the check be able to determine that an industry was there and it was recognised as a FOREST??

This might be something applicable (for now) only to the JGR patch...

[LaChupacabra]

Once I considered creating such a set where instead of the current names there would be street names. I guess every country has its ranking of streets that are repeated most often in different cities, right? This would be especially nice in the case of bus or tram stops, but not necessarily in the case of city train stations (then popular neighborhood names) or industrial stations far outside the city.
The problem that was and is currently impossible to solve is the renaming of East, West, North and South. In these cases, the names of the same streets would always appear in a certain part of the city, which would not be good.
If a new way would allow these names to be bypassed and allow non-street names to be given to enterprises and especially to distinguish by type of station, it would be a very interesting improvement.

If it was just a simple name swap, I would gladly do spin-off your add-on, or if the street names fit the concept, then just another language version.

[OzTrans]

... The problem that was and is currently impossible to solve is the renaming of East, West, North and South. In these cases, the names of the same streets would always appear in a certain part of the city, which would not be good.
If a new way would allow these names to be bypassed and allow non-street names to be given to enterprises and especially to distinguish by type of station, it would be a very interesting improvement. ...

It is possible. Just set the probability to 255. Default Names will then not appear, but you need to make sure you have enough custom names for all possible situations.

For the Canadian Theme Pack, I have just done that, but I included the default names as well, setting appropriate flags. Default Names are mainly used for rail stations only.

Below, the included default names ...

[LaChupacabra]

It is possible. Just set the probability to 255. Default Names will then not appear, but you need to make sure you have enough custom names for all possible situations.

So this patch is needed to make it possible in the common game version or is it possible now?
For such an addition with street names to make sense, it would be needed at least 30-40 items and for each a few or a dozen randomly selected possibilities. For example, "central" would have assigned the names most commonly used for the names of representative streets in city centers.

[OzTrans]

So this patch is needed to make it possible in the common game version or is it possible now?

'Extra Station Names' is a JGR-Patchpack ONLY feature and as such not available in OpenTTD 'vanilla'.

For such an addition with street names to make sense, it would be needed at least 30-40 items and for each a few or a dozen randomly selected possibilities. For example, "central" would have assigned the names most commonly used for the names of representative streets in city centres.

We could of course do with more categories (flags), like altitude, city centre and the like.

I have done about 100 names so far, not done by a long shot. But, it seems to work nicely. If I spot a strange name, I'll adjust the categories.