Topic: Individualizing buildings

While the roll-up windows (MMB) for individual buildings and other things are very helpful, you can easily get lost about who is who.

There is no way to know for example which one of the warehouses is shown in that window - unless of course, you remember.

I use those windows a lot, and I dont always remember.

Would it be feasable (and supported by the majority) to assign numbers or coordinates to each building that are shown in the headline of these windows and in the description that you get when you press "c" ?

This could be done per building type, so that you have "Arena 1", "Arena 2" etc. - or as unique building numbers, that assign consequetive numbers to all buildings, so that you have "Arena 410", "Arena 483" .

It would be a great help in general and in indentifying what your window shows.

On the con side it may seem too technical and destroy the "look and feel" of the game.

If that is a concern, we could maybe ask the mapmakers to indentify areas in the map ("Woody corner", "Muddy waters", "Great eastern plain") that could be used for this purpose (i.e. "Warehouse - Great Eastern Plain")

Being no programmer, I apologize for all my suggestions that imply undue workload and for other misjudgements due to lack of expertise or relevant skills.
I am on Win32, have no means to compile, and rely on prefabricated distributions (Thanks to Tino).

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SirVer wrote: Uuh.. I love the last idea with the map names ;). Unfortunately this puts too much work on the map makers

Well, maybe not, if the Map Editor could be made to support the feature.

I had imagined a "naming tool" that you could use similar to placing mining ressources or fish, but the truth is that I cannot judge about the additional workload for mapmakers (not to speak of programmers :). So far I never did one (except for S2). Braking the compatibility with S2 maps would probably be an additional issue.

... and don't really solve the problem (what about having all your sawmills on the great eastern plain. You're still stuck with not knowing what to do.

Yes, I was aware of this flaw in the suggestion. The named regions would have to be very small to be of universal usefulness. Probably not a solution on its own.

On the other hand having named regions in a map would be very helpful for storylines, campaigns, backround info that could reference these names. You could actually identify "The Rattlesnake pass", "The Misty Ridge", "Beaver Lake" and so on. Maybe someone could implement a feature that would show those region names in the game (CTRL-Mouseover?)

The other suggestion is very technical. But there's no reason why we shouldn't give players the opportunity to assign names to their buildings.... You might want to open a feature request for this.

Names given by the player would certainly be nice and something that nobody could object to --- but I wonder who would really do so. In addition it might be hard to give suitable names when you play an unknown map and the fog of war is enabled.

The ideal solution seems to be a triple approach:

1) Give Mapmakers the opportunity to name regions and use them for the purpose in question (and other purposes), if present.

2) Let the player edit a building's name.

3) Set a default name when a new building is erected, containing the building type and an identifying number. I think if you have the program count the preexisting buildings of that type and increment that to form "sawmill 16" it may not be too intrusive and technical. If the mapmaker has defined a named region, it would be "sawmill 16 - Great eastern plain"

Would that be something doable within reasonable effort and worth the pain?

Lets hear some opinions from those that can judge the benefits (content designers) and effort (programmers). I'm neither -- easy to make suggestions

Being no programmer, I apologize for all my suggestions that imply undue workload and for other misjudgements due to lack of expertise or relevant skills.
I am on Win32, have no means to compile, and rely on prefabricated distributions (Thanks to Tino).

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Each map object has a serial number. But it is changed when saving/loading a game (the reason is to reuse serial numbers to not run out of them when a game runs for a long time and a lot of objects are created and destroyed all the time).

A solution that would suit everyone would be format strings. For example:

%n : building name (internal not translated, "woodcutters_hut")

%N : building name (translated version, "Woodcutter's Hut")

%c : coordinates

%s : serial number

...and so on. Then the user could configure their own format string to show in building window titles, for example "%N at %c", which could be shown as "Woodcutter's Hut at (5, 11)".

I just checked with XConq and they claim to have named geographical features: http://sources.redhat.com/xconq/manual/xconq_12.html

Of course XConq also has named units.

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