Protective Tub is a strange and amusing autonamer that you've certainly seen in action if you watch LNA. It works by picking a random adjective and a random noun from-- you guessed it, a catalogue file, and stringing them together to create strange names such as "Lame Flower," "Observant Cattle," "Deafening Magic," and of course, "Protective Tub."
This agent, when injected, will also slightly modify your UI so the longer names will show up properly in the profile window. The upper-left display will still display shortened versions of the name. If you remove the agent, the autonamer will stop naming creatures but you should still be able to view and edit the longer names.
As a fair warning, you will notice a few kinks in dealing with the longer names-- the text at the top of the creature profile may run into itself, names will show up cut off in the creature menu and containment chamber, and if a particularly long-named creature expresses a hunger for protein or addresses another long-named creature, the speech bubble will eventually reach a max length and cut off the rest of the sentence. (edit 11-20-17-- the Speech Bubble Upgrades now fix this problem!) So far I have yet to see it horribly crash anything, but if you run into any severe problems, do get in touch with me.
But back to the topic at hand. One of the great things about catalogue files is that you can easily edit them without having to recode anything! After injecting the agent once, look for a catalogue file in your Docking Station\Catalogue folder called "random_name_bits.catalogue". Open this in notepad or similar plain text editor, and you will notice it contains two lists under the headers: TAG "name_noun" and TAG "name_adj". Here you can add your own nouns and adjectives to the lists, delete ones you don't like, and so on. Just be sure to keep them in quotes and don't change the tag headers.
Download Protective Tub. Have fun, and if your creatures end up with any completely hilarious names, feel free to share them in the comments!
Note: Protective Tub got a pretty big upgrade on 11/12/17! Check out the Advanced Protective Tub.
Very interesting! I tried out your agent, and unfortunately it looks like my installation is not working with catalogue files correctly. I have a bunch of modifications in the game that aren't limited to My Agents folder... Any idea on what to do? I tried moving the folder to My Documents, but with no luck. Perhaps I'm just doomed! Ha ha!
ReplyDeleteLame Flower actually sounds like a good name. Maybe someone over here didn't have enough sleep, though!
Eeek! I have been wondering about those names! Finally I can see where they come from! Thank you!
ReplyDeleteJessica, you might try freshly installing DS/Exodus to your Documents folder and then testing the agent. If it works, you can safely copy your old my agents folder, worlds, images, etc over to the new installation.
ReplyDeleteIf a fresh install to the documents folder still doesn't work, get in touch with me; I would be very curious to know more details, as I've never known anything installed outside the Program Files folder to cause such strange problems!
One of my first creatures named with this is called "Silly Walk" a la Monty Python's Flying Circus.
ReplyDeleteI got a norn called "Painstaking Waste". Man, that must be bad for her self esteem.
ReplyDeleteHello, I really love this agent and I was wondering if you would mind us translating you .catalogue file into French for the French community?
ReplyDeleteWhat a nice idea :> I don't mind at all, in fact, I would encourage you to change the file in whatever way suits you best!
DeleteOkay "Orange kite" sounds fitting for his name!
ReplyDeleteWhats your favored norn breed? i like Bengal,Bandana,Ron,Apple,civet,(most C1 breeds)
,Tree huge r,ALL menorns! Chi-chi, basically all of em mostly except the C2 ones! that game gives me the willies...
Hello!
ReplyDeleteWould you consider mirroring this file somewhere else in addition to songua.com? It has been in bandwidth exceeded mode for a long time and I can't find any existing mirrors as all mentions link back here. I'd really love to have this in my DS too.
Hi! I tried downloading this a couple of times (to make sure I didn't do something incorrectly), but the catalogue doesn't show up when I install it. I was able to get a stand-in in the meantime, but I want to use the original catalogue so I can add it to the name options I currently have. Is it available?
ReplyDeletehaha, one of my norns was named "acid action!" I laughed so hard
ReplyDelete