[Poll] Real or fictional town names?

[jamespetts]

I am planning to release a new version of Simutrans-Experimental-Complete based on the latest versions of Simutrans-Experimental and Pak128.Britain-Ex fairly soon, and am interested in people's views about default settings. In particular, what do people think about whether to use (by default) real or fictionalised town names? Using Simutrans's built-in town name generator, a very large number of plausible town names can be generated (far more than is practical to make into a list of fictional names). Do people prefer fictional names, or would people rather use the names of real towns?

Note that, whichever ends up being the default option, there will be instructions on how to make use of the opposite, whichever that may be.

[Dwachs]

I did not vote, but I do like the way it is handled in pak.german: There the city-list contains names of real cities / villages, but these cities are small and hence not famous. And the names are relatively short.

[inkelyad]

We also should point to name generators somewhere. I am using scripts and data from http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~pound/. But I very much doubt we can include them in distribution (licensing?).

[jamespetts]

Inkelyad - I haven't seen those. But I rather like Simutrans's own built-in name generator, at least when supplied with a decent list of name fragments.

[sdog]

i'm very much in favour of real town names. I know they are not at the correct positions, but they are much more easy to remember than fictious names. In fact i like it quite a lot if london is the smallest village on the map and an obscure wee town is a metropolis.  I also quite enjoy it to have a southern coast with such typical sea baths as brighton, blackpool and dundee.

On more practical terms, i can easily remember that in my latest large game my main route runs from shrewsbury* to sheffield, with a stop in manchester. The major branch lines go from Shrewsbury to Bristol, Taunton and Wolverhampton. I could never do this in openTTD, with it's artificial names. (Yes simutrans  has a better name generator)

*Shrewsbury was renamed, it's always my largest city in the map.

[Václav]

I am for real city names (not only in Experimental) - but: don't forget that names of some real cities (but mostly of villages) sound sufficiently fictious too.

Regardless of rule of not translating of (not only) city names, you can take (for example) czech citylist and after translation you will get city names what will sound fictious and unbelievable - and some city names sound fictious (and sometimes also comic) also in original language.

[ӔO]

Some direct translations of city names are fictitious enough.
Tokyo in english is simple eastern capital and Beijing is Northern capital

[sdog]

chinese city names save quite a lot of screen-space, james you could instead go for a chines translation of english names.

[VS]

You could experiment with Markov chains, too... That might create far better sets than combining prefix+suffix, since they won't keep repeating.

[wipi35]

I'm in favour of real names. I've made my own citylist, only containing names of max. 6 chars in order to save space in the various windows.