As part of my ongoing work with SCOREDIT, I’ve been working on porting some old code to a new utility for use in my newer project as well as a few other things I’ve got going on. To that end, I released Mang (Markov Name Generator), a tool for generating names and words.
Sigh… A procrastinator’s work is never done…
Mang uses Markov chains to generate output that is similar to, but not the same as, a given set of inputs. This means if you feed it a dictionary of English words, it will output words that look like English but are just a little bit off. This is great for building up conlangs, creating NPC names for your tabletop games, etc.
The library comes “batteries included,” meaning it already has a small collection of names you can use for name generation. The readme has more details on this. You can also browse the source to see what all is available.
I’ve had the old Mang lying around for a long time gathering dust. Built with WPF, it was serviceable and the output was okay. But I wanted to extract the Markov and name generation code and make it into something more portable. I was also frequently unhappy with the output, hitting the refresh button forever until I found something inspiring.
The new Mang has a few improvements to word generation to ensure no gibberish is put out. The library itself is tiny – just a few files. And its interface is small and foolproof.
To prove all these things to myself I plugged it into SCOREDIT today and got to generating:
As you can see, it’s not all perfect, but there’s a few good ones in there to serve as starting points. In the future I plan to extend the generation capabilities to come up with more “realistic” output, but that’s another blog post.
Head on over to the repo to check it out!