New name for Freeciv

Various topics about the game, the website, or anything else Freeciv related that doesn't fit elsewhere.
Dox4242
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New name for Freeciv

Post by Dox4242 »

Any suggestions?

Previous discussion viewable here: http://forum.freeciv.org/f/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=230

....

....

....I'm just drawing blanks... :( civ is too ingrained...what's an alternate concept?

Culture-, or society-something, maybe?
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Alien Valkyrie
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Re: New name for Freeciv

Post by Alien Valkyrie »

"Culsim" as in Culture Simulator? Nah, that sounds bad... "FreeWorld"? "Contiland"? Just throwing my crazy ideas here.
"Nation Conflict"? Yeah, I think that sounds at least kinda good.
~ AVL
cazfi
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Re: New name for Freeciv

Post by cazfi »

There's two things that must happen before we can decide to change the name, and even then it's just an option, not something people making the ultimate decision will necessary do.

1) This thread: We have to get a name that is worth switching to, including the fact that people agree with it relatively widely

2) There must be a sensible plan to do all the related work. I don't even know what all things need to be changed if we're not going to stuck using old name in some places and the new one in other places for a decade or so. I know this to include all the changes to the codebase (in which the hard part are things requiring backward compatibility, such as looking some files from ~/.freeciv too, and in extreme cases combining a file from ~/.freeciv and another from ~/.<newname> as one file when loading), documentation everywhere (included in version control, wiki...), infrastructure (we need to keep things like meta.freeciv.org and modpack.freeciv.org available for a long time), to things like communicating with IANA about the registration of the port 5556... In short, this seems like something that requires one person dedicated for that work only during the 3.0 cycle.
cazfi
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Re: New name for Freeciv

Post by cazfi »

About the name:

To me freeciv is about all aspects of the human history, or about cultural evolution. Of these I think word "evolution" should not be used since when people hear it, they primarily think of biological evolution. Another thing that name should incorporate is the fact that freeciv is not just one game, but our ruleset format allows many variations, which in extreme case could be called separate games. Obvious word here would be worlds. Combining these we get my first proposition of Cultured Worlds[/ı]. Yet I acknowledge that many people consider freeciv to be more about war than other parts of human culture, so though I'd be disappointed if final name contains war or conquest like every other other game, war may deserve part in the name.
Then I started thinking that maybe we could make the international nature of both the project, and the game world, represented in the name by not having it in English. The two options I've been considering are Latin as ancestor of most European languages, or Esperanto as one that combines them. If Latin phrase is used, it should be short enough for people to remember, or well-known phrase. Or just words that have been taken to English so directly that everyone realize their approximate meaning when they see them.
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Alien Valkyrie
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Re: New name for Freeciv

Post by Alien Valkyrie »

I'd go for Latin, since it's more... traditional. Also, I think there are more people learning Latin than people learning Esperanto.
So, how about Cultomundi? Wouldn't be traditional latin, but a merge of two words.
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Davide
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Re: New name for Freeciv

Post by Davide »

The word "mundi" is generally not understandable by anglophones. I owned the domain name freeciv-mundi.org for over a year, and I had to change it to civland.org right because users were unable to understand and remember it. Mundi was understandable only by spanish, portuguese and italian speakers, and was completely clueless to northern and eastern europeans.

Changing the domain name was a massive operation, much larger than what I had expected. The domain name was hard-coded across several virtual machines, dozens of scripts, config files, source files, and was registered on third-party machines too, like DNS providers, web analitics, wiki links, etc.

After spending hours doing what I wrongly predicted to be the easiest thing - grep-ing and replacing everywhere within my own filesystems - for several weeks later I continued to be surprised by spotting the name freeciv-mundi still hidden in some file here and there and causing incompatibilities or undetected bugs.

I imagine that renaming Freeciv is a massive operation, much larger than what I'd be able to predict, and would require an immense amount of work and discussion for not less than a few months.
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Alien Valkyrie
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Re: New name for Freeciv

Post by Alien Valkyrie »

Well, if we can't use mundus for "world", we can still use orbs. Cultorbes. I think most people will be able to understand that. Or we take "worlds" out of the name and look for something else that's easy to remember for most people.
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cazfi
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Re: New name for Freeciv

Post by cazfi »

"Orbs" was actually one of the words I have been playing with. I'd be a wary to shorten Culture as "Cult", though. Let's pretend we're not cultists.
Davide
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Re: New name for Freeciv

Post by Davide »

Caedo wrote:I think most people will be able to understand that.
Not me, at all!

Orbs most closely sounds like orbo to my mind.
Sarilho1
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Re: New name for Freeciv

Post by Sarilho1 »

Caedo wrote:Well, if we can't use mundus for "world", we can still use orbs. Cultorbes. I think most people will be able to understand that. Or we take "worlds" out of the name and look for something else that's easy to remember for most people.
I hate that name. Personally I like Freeciv, but if you want to change, this can't be one if the options. The word "civilization" is the more accurate word to describe the game. At least better than culture. You may want to try use the word empire instead.
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