Automatic station names & duplicate station names

[GGa]

It's actually two suggestions, but they are so mixed that I think they fit well in one topic.

Because I'm not good at explaining, I made some pictures (see in the "spoilers")...

1) A random station renamed "ABC", and a station with automatic name
The automatic name is "Chur Mines":

[+] Spoiler

fig_1.png (968.85 KiB) Viewed 1416 times

2) Rename the second station
Rename the second station from "Chur Mines" to "Chur":

[+] Spoiler

fig_2.png (942.41 KiB) Viewed 1416 times

Please note that, if I try to further rename this station to "ABC", I get red message saying that the names must be unique (see: picture 5)

3) Add another station in the middle of the town
The station gets the automatic name "Chur".
So, two stations (out of three) are exactly homonymous.

[+] Spoiler

fig_3.png (986.98 KiB) Viewed 1416 times

*Continues on the next post because I appear not to be able to insert more than three pictures.*

[GGa]

4) Add some roads and a vehicle
The truck's second order is to go to the (chronologically) third station (the one in the middle of the town, with automatic name "Chur").
And it knows it can't reach it.
It can reach a truck station with matching name, but it doesn't get fooled: it knows which "Chur" it wants to go to.

[+] Spoiler

fig_4.png (919.34 KiB) Viewed 1412 times

5) I can't manually assign a duplicate name to a station
Not easy to see, but I tried to re-rename the (chronologically) second station to "ABC", and...

[+] Spoiler

fig_5.png (951.74 KiB) Viewed 1412 times

6) A station name is lost forever
Regardless how many stations I put near that mine, there will never be another "Chur Mines": this name is lost forever (well, I could set this name manually, but it will never assigned as automatic name).

[+] Spoiler

fig_6.png (1.01 MiB) Viewed 1412 times

(There is a "Genève Mines", but no "Chur Mines")


So, I think I can guess how this works: when a new station is made and an automatic name must be picked, the criterion for the usability of a name is "do I remember to have already used it for this town?"

My proposal is: why not change this with the criterion "is the resulting name already in use?" ?
This will "correct" two glitches: the homonymous names and the "lost forever" possible name.

Second proposal: if, as it appears to be, it's not actually a problem that two station share the name, couldn't we stop forbidding it?
It would be very useful when (e.g.) I want to invert the names of two stations.

That's all.
Thank you for reading (if you had the patience to arrive here).
Bye,
GGa

[Eddi]

so there are two separate "issues" here:
1) the manual name "Chur" doesn't forbid the automatic name "[empty prefix]Chur[empty postfix]" from appearing. This is a leftover from the original game, back then it was probably deemed too difficult to match the list of automatically generated names to the manual names.
2) the automatic name "Chur[postfix: Mines]" gets remembered, because the manual station name can be reset to the automatic name, so it will not be given out again.

[GGa]

Well, those are actually two consequences of the "usability criterion" for an automatic name.
I know they are just minor glitches, but I would propose to change the behaviour (nothing urgent, of course...).

The second proposal is to stop to forbid manual renaming to an already used name, if it's not really a problem.

[Tsylatac]

My understanding is the game doesn't actually store a station name unless a player has changed it. Normally stations only know (the ID of) the town they're linked to and (the ID of) the suffix they've been assigned. This is probably most important for multiplayer since it lets everyone see the default station names in their own preferred language, though it also means you can rename a town and all of its stations (that haven't been renamed by a player) will update in kind.

IIRC when this has been brought up in the past, this won't be "fixed" because it's not worth complicating the existing benefits, especially when the workaround for "I can rename a station to a name I know the game will try to give out in the future!" is "well, don't do that then."

[GGa]

Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas

Thanks for your explanation.
At least, now I know why ^_^

[Eddi]

default station names in their own preferred language

i think this is the key point here. you cannot compare a manual name with all translations of the generated name.