I have added a custom naming theme with over 1800 entries for use as a system theme for a game without the ‘Known Star Systems’ option. Aurora unfortunately uses it alphabetically rather than randomly. Loading a manually randomized list doesn’t help either, as Aurora automatically sorts those lists.
This doesn’t happen with other naming themes, so I’m not sure whether this is WAI or I’m just missing an option.
Does anyone know how to ‘force’ Aurora to randomly choose entries of a custom theme?
Well, that’s an interesting twist. I had always assumed Aurora would go by the order of the names in the table.
I know of no way to tell Aurora to select system names randomly from a given theme.
Steve would have to add that as a feature. Either an explicit option in the game, or by removing the part of the code that (apparently) sorts the themes alphabetically.
The themes for ship names can be randomised on the class window. I don’t think I ever got around to doing that for the system name themes.
I should have mentioned that I have never used a custom system theme before. Random name selection works well with ships, which is why I had assumed it would work the same way with systems.
However, testing a ‘vanilla’ system theme does actually prove a random name selection.
I had assumed there to be a hidden option either in-game or in the database that I must have missed.
In any case, it’s not the end of the world. I can ‘manually randomize’ to my heart’s content, just would prefer if I didn’t have to.
This is strange. I use custom name themes all the time and Aurora has always used the same order of names as in the original text files.
Turns out I was wrong. During testing I mixed up the themes. Aurora does not sort themes by itself, but picks them top to bottom.
Viewing a theme in game using the ‘select name’ option in a shipyard merely displays it alphabetically in that window. Using it as a system theme reveals that the names are indeed always picked in the same order.
Sorry for the confusion!