South African Regens

I'm currently playing as orlando pirates in the south african premier league(i went there on holiday this year and was fascinated by the 7 channels dedicated to football). what i've notice is that when the regens come through, the few white players that i get have african names. shouldnt they have european surnames at the least?

yeh i've noticed that too. its the same with quite a few French regens who come through with names such as Traore or Diallo or Cisse.

I wonder if that will be sorted in fm9?

Thats not neccessary to be a problem? why cant a White South African have a native African father/grand-dad/etc..... which make this player share an African surname...

Same case as some Chinese regen from Hong Kong have British surname.

Theres no problem with that, but everyone of them? now that is unlikey!

yeah i agree. Mbangwa Ndlovu with long blonde hair was a surprise

There's probably not a script to change names based on skin colour.

It'd be a nice cosmetic feature but it's not the end of the world.

Great example of the 'problem' would be a Mexican-American regen in one of my games. He was playing for Chivas in the Mexican League, all relatively realistic. Lots of hispanic Americans after all. His name? Clint Beard.

Clint Beard? and i bet he was a superstar of the mexican team

I'm pretty sure that skin colour is totally random for generated players and independent of name - it would be a total minefield of potential racism if some kind of method was used to try to determine based on a name what colour skin the facegen person should have. It is a bit unrealistic though at times - I don't know of many black Icelandic people although I may be wrong.

Yeah I noticed this a while back with a lot of white French regens with West African names. Also a few black Austrians (with Austro-German names) that seems a little unrealistic. I've also noticed a lack of mixed race regens from say, Brazil. They all appear to be black or milk bottle white, no Ronaldo/Roberto Carlos types.

Of course this is just a minor issue, a cosmetic one, but then FaceGen is a cosmetic feature and the whole thing shouldn't be ducked completely because of worries about racism and such.

I can, though, understand why it can't be fixed easily, I wrote a Name Generator for a simple F1 management game I wrote a few years ago and kept a database of forenames and surnames for each language/naming system (rather than nationality) and weighted probabilities for each nationality (so for example Swiss names could be drawn from German, French or Italian names), or Argentine surnames could be Spanish or Italian, but the forenames always Spanish. A similar technique could be applied here but would require a lot more storage, and work (to populate the DB of names for each language), for example a South African regen, rather than picking a "South African" name, would pick from an English (white or coloured), Afrikaans/Dutch (white or coloured) or Zulu/native (black) name, and the race of the FaceGen could be determined from this.

I guess another technique could be to append to each person in the existing database a hidden nationality for the origin of their surname, so for example a French player with a surname like Cisse or Diarra, even if they don't have Senegalese/Malian/Ivorian/etc. as a second nationality, the regen module could help link names to their countries of origin much easier.

But I would agree with anyone who said it would be a hell of a lot of work for a problem which has got to be fairly low down in the priority scale.

I agree its a minor issue, but its one of those things that when you are playing a career game, it goes from minor to rather annoying. I guess i'll have to grin & bear it.

Or make regen's names editable

Or make regen's names editable

use the set nickname?

I have never once given a player or member of staff or anyone a nickname in all my years of playing CM/FM!

I have never once given a player or member of staff or anyone a nickname in all my years of playing CM/FM!

I never thought I would use it until a few years ago when I had two players with same name!

I got them wrong so many times I had to add in nicknames of Defence & Forward

Nickname only sets one name though, I've done it for Spanish regens that often have four names, or for Brazilians (when loads of regens reach a reasonably high profile and a few of them have the same name, I'll stick an -inho or something like that on the end of one of them LOL)

i had a south african regen

Or make regen's names editable

Use FMrte, it does the job, I use it for exactly that purpose, changing stupid regen names.

By the way I had several milkwhite NIgerians and Cameroonians in my game..

That's a really good idea, Ferrari312!

I don't think it would be so hard to fix the database for it. If SI only writes the script i'm sure that they'll find plenty of researchers that can do the rest.

I have to agree with everyone that says it's a minor but annoying issue. I hope it will be solved sometime.

The system should also take notice of large immigrant group so that for example in Sweden we would get something like 80% Swedish names and then the rest would be mostly Balkan or Arabic names (and some others too). Some with second nationality and some without.