I'm trying to make a custom name list for my townies in Sims 3. Most of the ones that exist on MDS seem to be localisations - US English names, Icelandic names, Danish names, etc. I'm tyring to make a more international pool for the game to pull from, along with a heavy sprinkling of nouns, and quirky or archaic names. Honestly, it's mostly for personal use, but I don't see a problem sharing if people want. I was tired of "Bob Smith", "Sarah Gilmore" and "Laura Jones", and I'm leaning into "Pjotur Cupcake", "Euphemia Iwersen" and "Glacier Owuso" instead.

I want to know what characters will be accepted by the game, as I'm concerned that I may make the game crash. I know A-Z are okay, and probably 0-9. My name IRL has a character with an accent, and I am unsure if the game will accept that. Pulling name lists from the web, I am getting a lot of these letters with diacritics (like Otávio). Does anyone know if the game will accept these? Also unsure about hyphens (like in Smith-Jones) or spaces (like Mary Beth as a first name). And if I give a character the name Anabel but want to show she is Ana for short, can I use quotes like "'Ana' Anabel" as a first name?

I'd ask all this in the STBLizer thread, but it's been abandoned since 2013...

What things have you tried that worked and did not work? Test and see what goes through and what does not? I do know that for world names it does not accept much, so total guess is not much for whole game, but check to see if that is so or not?

Make a package, put it in your game, see if it works. If it works, great. If no, remove it.

If you look, many STBL's, they are in many different languages, and alphabets from Cyrillic to Japanese to Arab texts.

I understand why you're both telling me to try it and see. However, I'd prefer to know at the compilation stage, since each file is going to have about 6000 names. Going through and removing diacritics/hyphens/spaces later is going to be labourious.

While other games accept these characters, I have English localisation, so I'm not sure the game will accept the same characters it would for other localisations

You do not do 6000 at once. And how would you ever have/need that many when a Sims world has a few hundred Sims at the most? You try a few. One at a time. Odds are it will not take anything not used in English if your game is in English.

It has been ages since I took a Sim to the town hall to change a name, which as I recall is how it is done. Try some things there and see what it accepts and what it does not accept? And if this is that important to you, change the Sims one by one. You do not need 6000 names or even a fraction of that.

Creating means experimenting. Experimenting means to try, fail, try, fail, try... WIN! It is a step by step process. You do not need 6,000 names, as @daisylee said. And for a test, perhaps 20 names, all using the foreign characters will be sufficient for test purposes. So, you make a test package, drop it in your game, clear caches, start a new test game, and see what happens.

So, can I convert a 60,000 to 80,000 vertices MMD model into a Plumbot? I do not see where anyone has done this. I will try! A lot of work, reducing poly count, remapping UV, boning, textures, test, redo, test, redo, test, and maybe 1 or 2 months later... WIN!

Sometimes, even in an ancient game like TS3, it is possible that no one did what you want, and it's up to you to try. For me, it often comes to, "How much do I want this?"

As far as I understood it, I needed at least 1000 names for the file to work...

I'm fully okay with experimenting, but it needs to be a big file. I certainly can't make a file with one name, the game won't accept that.

Edit: To be clear, I do appreciate that you are giving me advice, I just wholly do not know how to use said advice. I can't make a file with a single name, and I don't know if the game will crash if it hasn't picked a name with an unusual character.

I'm also not sure what is meant by me not needing that many names, because it's the number in this exsiting template.

I know zero about doing this but I think LadySmoks is suggesting that you replace the template with a smaller test one rather than revise the whole current one, if possible? She can add more as needed. Whether you want to spend time on this or not, and risk totally messing up your game or not is up to you.

Okay, many thanks. I will give it a go, putting together 1000 or so names

If you really need 1,000 names (not sure any other name mod has that many, but I never counted them), "borrow" an existing name mod. Put that mod in a fresh game to see that it works. Then, add 10, 20 or however many of YOUR names with special accents, etc to the existing mod. Restart and see if your names are in the game. If that works, you know your names should be fine in a larger package.

So the STBLizer is where I got this info of 1000 names, I think. But my problem is, I don't know if the game will crash if it selects a townie name with no special characters. In other words, I'm hypothesising that the file may run fine UNTIL it picks a name with an 'offending' character. Therefore rendering the test useless they all have special characters.

I have never used the tool you mentioned. But, as I have said before, STBL's have multiple languages for object descriptions and other things.

So, I must be very blunt... Grow some stones! Who cares if the game crashes? It's Sims 3... You have an angel on your shoulder if your game has never crashed! As I have been saying, not everything is cut and dry, and not everything has necessarily been done before. So what if it crashes the game? If it does, take the package out. No harm done. I have crashed my game a few times while trying something new. I remove the package and life goes on, and I learned that doing something the way I tried did not work.

Use an existing names list (if you really need 1,000 names), add YOUR names to it and test it in game. I am not going to do it for you.

As true as it is that tedious testing is one of the many trials by fire of creating... would it perhaps be more straightforward to just copy the symbols you want to test the support for and paste them into the name field in CAS?

TS3 uses regular old fonts like any other program, that support everything they would when installed to a text editor. The ones that are supported will display and the ones that aren't will not (they'll either just not appear, or show as a little blank box). The game crashes when there's a hard failure to call a resource, or with bad scripting errors- I could be wrong, but I don't really think you would see a CTD from unsupported text.
Here's a little popup of some special formatting characters it won't allow:

I think everything else from standardized fonts is just fine There's quite the collection of name lists at the end of the download page for NRaas StoryProgression if you'd like to look at them for reference.

Best of luck to your project!

I should not even comment as know about zero about this, but if the game is set as English it will show cannot have those. But does that mean other things from other languages are allowed? If set to English it would not even address those things as out of the ballpark? If the game is set to English it will not say you cannot use French, or Spanish , or whatever things?

The restricted characters are likely more for script reasons than anything. The strings ingame use brackets and such when defining a place to insert a name, or to match pronouns, etc. Much safer to restrict use of special formatting characters that could break those functions. It's likely these are universally restricted, and anything else will be on a font-by-font basis.

There are multiple name mods here on MTS, these are all the ones I found just by typing name in the search.

https://modthesims.info/d/675976/ic...eplacement.html
https://modthesims.info/d/646783/swedish-name-list.html
https://modthesims.info/d/637047/po...d-surnames.html
https://modthesims.info/d/554596/gi...n-name-mod.html
https://modthesims.info/d/531578/nordic-names.html
https://modthesims.info/d/501335/ja...erride-mod.html
https://modthesims.info/d/499946/co...cement-mod.html
https://modthesims.info/d/482491/be...erride-mod.html
https://modthesims.info/d/482047/go...the-sims-3.html

The last one posted to MTS, the Icelandic one has accents on letters over the names, and it appears to work fine. As it was just posted this year you could probably message the creator and ask them if they had problems creating it, or just take all of them and combine them into one large masterlist for your own use.