First/Last Names Update mod for Pro Football

[gplehner]

Exhausted by an excess of "Ernest"? Fed up with a flood of "Frank"? Drowning under a deluge of "Dean"?

For those of you who simulate with the AI's custom-created player names, you may see certain names come up a lot. These names are randomly chosen from a couple .TXT files in the installation, and if a name is more 'popular', it gets listed multiple times in the file so that it has a higher chance of being drawn.

These lists (I'm guessing) are just the 'most popular' first names list from a US Census, but the variety wasn't to my liking; I thought we could do better, and I'm all for hyperrealism.

So I gathered some recent data and through some expressions/algorithms, extrapolated a Names list similar to what gets installed, but it considers (and fixes) the following:
- First names more likely to be 'given' by the age range of men currently in their 20s-30s
- First & Last names more likely to be had by the demographics involved in American football
- Fixes issues with last names that have a capital letter or space in the middle ('Mcdonald' is now 'McDonald')
- List includes more 'nickname' versions of names than the full, formal name (i.e. more Zacks than Zacharys)
- I also threw in some 'recent' birth names from 2020-ish to spice up the list a little bit

For example, the FIrstNames file that is installed has two names that begin with Y: 'Young' and 'Yong'. Each of these are listed a handful of times.
My mod has the following names: Yael, Yahir, Yahya, Yehuda, Yisroel, Yosef, Yousef, Yusuf. Each of these are listed 1 time, because they are really rare names - but you're likelier to meet someone with one of these first names than 'Young'.

This mod isn't for everyone. It's really obscure, I get that haha. But if you'd like to install, overwrite the "FirstNames" and "LastNames" files at the following path:
<your drive>:\Program Files\Wolverine Studios\Draft Day Sports - Pro Football 20XX\Data

With the following TXT files at:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ElhtosttrHKGBlH9tPMnqIRQsMAWOjFH/view?usp=sharing

You won't see it "in action" unless you create a new league or you start a new season and see the new names of rookies generated for the future draft.

It should work with 2021 and later. Can't confirm anything earlier than that.

Happy simming!