How Many Different Guest Names Are There in RCT2?

Guests can have all kinds of different names, but how many possibilities are there exactly? In this video we find out.

Outro music by Panorrrama:

[MarcelVos]

There are quite a few comments about what happens if you have guest 1 in the park and guest 16385 comes into the park as they would have the same name. This isn't actually a problem as the guest name is just a simple string that's shown on the screen to make the game more immersive. The game identifies guests by their number so it's not an issue to have multiple guests with the same name.

[believeinthenet]

I don't mind the last name initials usually clumping together, it gives the impression that a family has entered the park

[Naftoreiclag]

Petition to add "Marcel V." as a possible name:

[CloudConnection]

Good ol' Bernard/Bernice, always showing up first to park you build like a true friend

[Musicrafter]

The sorts of little tricks Assembly programmers like Chris Sawyer used to make games run faster on hardware from 1999 is astounding. RCT is a programming masterpiece.

[decalcomanie]

Someone should make an easteregg of Marcel V. being one of the possible guests but he has a hidden trait that he will never ride a heartline twister

[UntouchedWagons]

I knew the name generation wasn't random because I had noticed that Bernice was always the first guest but I had no idea how name gen actually worked. Neat.

[MichaelfromtheGraves]

Back in 2000 or so, my siblings and I had a park that had a huge lost guest problem. We used to just sit and watch the notification bar and say things like "I know a Cindy M." We were honestly too stupid or inexperienced to just locate one of the guests and see where they were. I guess we assumed they were just lost in the park and it was a normal function of the game. Turns out my brother had built a ride with a short exit path that didn't connect to anything. I built one a huge path bridge straight from that ride exit to the park gate, eventually incorporating that bridge into the rest of the park.

[jamester]

Omg Im dying at the auto-translated dutch subtitles. It combines your dutch accent and fuses your words to their phonetical Dutch twin.

[MaskedGEEK]

So if you were a sadist, you could trap one guest in your park so they can never leave, then wait until the next guest with the same name show up and trap them, and repeat until the park is full of guests with just one name. Of course we'll likely be living in Star Trek times with actual space travel by the time you wait for the park to fill up with guests of the same name. Or just rename everyone to the same name. 😂

[GAnimeRO]

Now to have someone to ask OpenRCT to include the missing letters and add even more names into the game.

[pettipasb]

the day I found my name as a child I was beyond thrilled considering my name was only ever found once in Disney world theme park on a key chain.

[pipepicasso]

Some guest names you can change with perks
A fast go-kart racer Michael Schumacher
Automatically Happy Guest Melanie Warn
Fast Go-Kart Driver Damon Hill
Guest Paints Pictures Simon Foster
Guest Takes Numerous Photographs Chris Sawyer
Guest will make other guests rich Richard Branson
Positive Thinking Guest John Wardley
Slow Go-Kart driving Mr.Bean
Waving Guest Katie Brayshaw

[Heshla_Biea]

Looking at the code, the number of available names makes some sense. There are 2^14 names, which need 14 bits to represent them. The id gets multiplied by 4 (2^2) at a point, which means that 2 more bits are used. (Everything gets shifted left two bits.) The id is transferred to a 16 bit variable beforehand. You literally wouldn't be able to store any more names without changing the size of this variable.

[Serule]

Oh my gosh, I remember keeping track of guest #1, Bernice D, whenever I could. I actually got sad when they left my park; I even built them a memorial shrine loool! Cool to know it wasn't actually random!

[BMoser-bvkn]

I had assumed it was random, but that's only because I never gave it any thought. Of course it wouldn't be random, you'd have to store more variables in memory if it were. 14 bits per person, times 9000 means it'd take around +126 kb of RAM for a feature that wouldn't really do anything.

It's super nice that we have enough memory now to store everything as plain ASCii if we want to. Having lookup tables for text in stuff like Diablo 2 is just a huge pain in the rear. That's one thing I REALLY don't miss about the old days. It's cute for little retro-style mini games like "pick one of these eight names for your jRPG hero!", utter masochism otherwise.

[JayEmGe]

Thank you again for another upload! I've been binge watching your videos again!

[wesleynewcomb]

At first I wondered how this video could be 5 minutes long, since the answer was pretty obvious (# of first names * # of last initials), but the bit twiddling part was helpful. When the number of possibilities came up, I thought, "Wow, then how did I get lucky so many times to see a Wes/Wesley N. in so many of my parks?"
Well, because it's fated to happen in every playthrough.

[Jolpe]

Spotted a typo on the name table at 2:40 ish
Linsdsey in OpenRCT2 column 🙃

[WereDictionary]

I dont think this is coming up too much but I find the background music of these videos to be incredibly soothing.

Also yeah, when I played this at age 12 and didnt know how this game operates, I thought that the names were random.
With all the videos I watched on this channel, my current belief is that the game is more or less a very sophisticated assembly of lists, so this revelation didnt surprise me as much as it would have about 20 years ago. ^^