Additional Names

[Your_Imaginary_Friend]

Is there anything a fellow like me can do to add to the database of names used in the game? I'm not certain how that is stored, or how I would do that. Pulling names from other sports sims and adding them to a database might be easy but time consuming. I've a lot of time these days, being retired and all.

[Gary Gorski]

Yeah if you want to I would be happy to send you a spreadsheet file with the information now that you could add to and then I could incorporate them into the game. Shoot me a PM with your email and I will work it up for you in a day or so.

[Magic Bird]

Is there anything a fellow like me can do to add to the database of names used in the game? I'm not certain how that is stored, or how I would do that. Pulling names from other sports sims and adding them to a database might be easy but time consuming. I've a lot of time these days, being retired and all.

The names are stored in the default.dat file found in the game's main directory. Be careful when opening and modifying default.dat; create a backup of default.dat before doing so. Within the file you will find some tables with names like "USFirstName" and "NonUSLastName." These tables contain the names used in the game.

I also have been interested in creating a much more expansive, comprehensive, and realistic set of names for use in the game. It helps that finding and studying names happens to be a personal hobby. The developer of another game, Basketball GM, did so for his game. He used a program and wrote a script to scour DraftExpress for the names and nationalities of every player in their database in order to create Basketball GM's current name set. One can read more about what he did here: https://basketball-gm.com/blog/2016/06/more-realistic-player-names-including-international-players/. It's a fascinating read. Unfortunately Basketball GM's source code is no longer hosted online, but I did look at how the names were organized and stored before the developer removed the code from GitHub. Due to how JavaScript works, he was able to store only one instance of each name and associate each name with a number to determine how frequently each name occurs.

Sample Names List:
John, 1
Mike, 2
Joe, 4
Aaron, 5
Dave, 8
DeAndre, 9
Eric, 10
Pete, 12

The difference between the number associated with one name and the number next to the previous name determines the frequency of the name. So Dave would be the most common name in my example, Joe and Pete would be the next most common names, and all the other names would be the least commonly used names. Here's a section on this from part of Basketball GM's customization guide: https://basketball-gm.com/manual/customization/game-attributes/#player-names.

I was considering using not only DraftExpress as a source for names, but also Basketball-Reference, College Basketball Reference, U.S. Census data, and probably even the College and Pro Football Reference sites (want to see a D'Brickashaw generated every once in a while? ). For more international names I will probably use many other sources. This would result in a massive amount of unique names. Unfortunately, DDS:CB and DDS:PB rely on listing names multiple times in the database in order to increase frequency, so it may not be practical (or even possible depending on the maximum capacity of the tables) to expand number of names currently in the tables from a few thousand to more than 100,000. In order to accommodate the sheer number of names that such an endeavor would pool, the way the game stores names may have to be changed.

I am willing to work on compiling and organizing a list of names as well.