Name Database?

How about a copy of the Manhattan white pages?

Sure. That might work. Do you have a subroutine that'll read the names into and link them to a character of the right ethnic background? :)

Do they have to be legitamate names, or would something randomly generated suit you?

The key is that they have to be ethnicly correct.

For example, I'll be working from Census data and need to create the correct number of Hispanics, Asians, etc. (And I'll be doing this on two levels - State and Congressional districts.) And since the character pool will be about 50,000 per game world (with about 50 concurrent game worlds) I don't want to have to build my own database if I can avoid it.

[Edited by - RandyChase on September 23, 2005 3:52:07 PM]

My first thought is something like a baby names site. You'll have to do some parsing to get the data extracted from the HTML (shouldn't be too hard really with regexps or DOM traversal), but that site has about 10k first names and associated origin. Maybe a genealogy site would have similar data for last names?

edit: According to Wikipedia such data is available from the US census office, but their site is currently under repair.

check out The Everchanging Book of Names.

assuming you are willing to pay $10 and put a bit of time into it, you could get the full version and have it generate as many names as you like. there are already several "chapters" you can download, which generate names from different cultures (some of them are real, and others are from "star trek" and "wheel of time").

Quote:

Original post by krez check out The Everchanging Book of Names. assuming you are willing to pay $10 and put a bit of time into it, you could get the full version and have it generate as many names as you like.

Krez,

Thanks a ton for this link. Looks like the best resource I've seen yet.

Have a nice weekend.

Randy

I have to jump in here and also reccomend the Ever Changing Book of Names. I use it extensively as a random name generator and the additional chapters that you can get make it an extremely valuable tool. I think I have yet to see the same name appear twice regardless of how many iterations of the same chapter I've run.

Anyway, that's all I've got.

Vopisk