Modifying Naming Simplifications in FTL: Faster than Light

Does anyone know anything about the simplified names in FTL? This isn't much of an important issue for the most part, but it would be nice to learn how to use the naming methods to my advantage when naming my crewmembers

Is there any way to choose which name simplification method the game uses for any given crew member using a special character on the keyboard? to me it seems random whether or not a crewmember will even keep their name simplification when you change it. As I said, this isn't IMPORTANT, but I like the customization the naming gives my runs, and would like to learn more about how it works, has anyone messed around with it enough to know how to master it?

(oh and a funny thing, I ended up with two "Jones" humans on my last run, and I didn't have either of them from the start)

Solution 1:

if anyone is still looking at this

"Christoph Z" always simplifies to Chriz, and Frederick drops the k at the end without even adding a period. I also recently got a crewmember named Wai-Shing which simplifies to WaiShing. I can't actually put "-" in crew names. I don't know any other names that do this yet

Other than those exceptions it appears that any name either over 7 characters or beyond 50-55 (probably 53) pixel width will be abbreviated to that point. "iiiiiiiiiiiiiLL" doesn't get abbreviated, it's 53 pixels wide in-game, but 15 characters long, which is the max the game allows "iiiiiiiiiiiiLLL" however, gets its last L truncated and replaced with a period because it goes over 53(?) pixels width.

"111111111111111" gets truncated to the eighth 1 because adding a ninth 1 would push the pixel width to 54. "11111111i", which is 53 pixels wide exactly, does not get truncated.

Names with two or more parts will always be simplified to show the last name only, unless the last name doesn't meet the above criteria of under 7 under 53px. If this happens, the First name will be shown instead

The above values are mostly guesses since I don't have access to the game code, but it usually works out

It would be nice if anyone could find other exceptions to the naming rule besides Chriz and Frederic

I'm about to go to bed, but I found that names with one or two letters in the front such as "CY Heng" "Zz Top" or "xY iiiiiiiiiiii" (oddly enough this width ends up being 57, perhaps the space doesn't count?) will not truncate as long as the length of the entire name meets the length criteria. I will look into this tomorrow.

A couple of abnormalities before I go: "x iiiiiiiiiiiiY" and "VV iiiiiiiiii" don't get truncated. in the first example, if x is replaced with certain letters of the same width, the name will get truncated, but otherwise stays the same. for the second, the length is 55 pixels, and yet it doesn't get truncated.