Name your Squad Members?

[TrickyCatSimpleKiss]

Hey, I'm new to the board, just discovered AA the other day. I'm sorry if my question has been answered somewhere else, even though I did do some searching, so please excuse me.

Anyways, I've got some Squad members who are doin' some damage, and I was wondering if it were possible to edit their names? Or do I have to modify the files of the game to do so? One of my favorite things about old school X-Com was naming my squad members after all the marines from Aliens. I kind of wanna name some of my veterans like that.

I get really attached to my elite squads.

[Dark Hunter]

The names for the squads are randomly chosen so you can't name your sergeant "Bob Smash O Lot" or something like that.

However you can still edit the names, theres a file in "data" folder called "names". I believe that I heard somewhere that if there are only 10 names in the file then your squads will have the same names so your sergeant might not be called "Bob Smash O Lot" but at least one of your squad members will be called "Bob Smash O Lot".

[the_Fifth_Horseman]

Correct.

[Niklas]

It is correct that new soldiers get their names from the generic name file \data\names.txt. However if the file \squads\<squad id>\data\names.txt exist the names will be picked from this file instead.

You can however edit the \squads\<squad id>\progress.dat file and change the names of the current soldiers that way. I don't think that there should be any problems with doing this.

Note: Editing the progress files could cause the game not to run so I urge you do do backups and only change this stuff manually if you know what you are doing!

[Jakerbeef]

I've tried changing the names in both text files but I'm encountering a problem.

When I try to start the game it just hangs on the loading screen and won't go any further. Can anyone advise? :blushing:

[Niklas]

Sounds very odd. What program did you use to edit the file?

Hope you did the backup thing I recommended.

[the_Fifth_Horseman]

Please attach the modified files to your post. That's the fastest way we can determine what went wrong.

[Jakerbeef]

Pretty much word-for-word all I've been doing is going into the data/names.txt file and deleting the names that are in there and changing them for about roughly of 30 of my own. Also tried this with the squads/1/data/names.txt file with the same result.

So instead of

Aaron
Accardi
Aguila
Etc

It's

Blah1
Blah2
Blah3

[Jakerbeef]

I think I may have worked it out.

In deleting the names I think I was deleting the full stop at the bottom. I'll check it now.