The original smell system was perfect, what we got now makes little sense

[warmer]

The original smell system was perfect. It made logical sense.

What we have now is a gamified version of that to make eating more of a threat than actually cooking the food.

This is absolutely backwards.

Remove smell from eating and add heat to cooking food "outside"
I am all for a screamer to show up when I have a dozen steaks on a grill, but smelling me drink a can of soup stock from 25 meters away is just DUMB.

Am I pouring this soup all over my face first?

HOT food surely makes a smell.
COLD food hardly smells.

I am sure this is a work in progress, but it's overly aggressive and illogical currently.

Make smell be related to the cooking of food and raw meat. I'd be happy if they brought back the need to bathe as well. Eating a can of cold food shouldn't carry for 25 meters unless they are actually cats and the sound of that can opening gets them moving!

 

[Kyoji]

I agree the logic behind some of it indeed gamified. Zombies as a trope have been attracted to meat. Not so much canned pears.

It's not a big issue for me but can at least agree it doesn't make as much sense as smelling newly killed game such as a rabbit or deer.

 

[Adam the Waster]

The original smell system was perfect. It made logical sense.

What we have now is a gamified version of that to make eating more of a threat than actually cooking the food.

This is absolutely backwards.

Remove smell from eating and add heat to cooking food "outside"
I am all for a screamer to show up when I have a dozen steaks on a grill, but smelling me drink a can of soup stock from 25 meters away is just DUMB.

Am I pouring this soup all over my face first?

HOT food surely makes a smell.
COLD food hardly smells.

I am sure this is a work in progress, but it's overly aggressive and illogical currently.

Make smell be related to the cooking of food and raw meat. I'd be happy if they brought back the need to bathe as well. Eating a can of cold food shouldn't carry for 25 meters unless they are actually cats and the sound of that can opening gets them moving!

Also veggies should bearly smell

 

[Adam the Waster]

I think the old system were meat/food in our pocket should make smell

But here's what I would do

Every meat base item gives of smell and you have a corver feature that you need a bundle and you place it over the item. But meat base items give the best Food/stats

Veggies and veggie base foods dont give smell.

Bleeding, sweating from running, dysentery and laceration give off smell.

You get dirty over time from sweat, gore, Dirt, etc and you gotta clean yourself with diving in water, using water from a JAR, OR soap

 

[aceguy7]

I think the old system were meat/food in our pocket should make smell

But here's what I would do

Every meat base item gives of smell and you have a corver feature that you need a bundle and you place it over the item. But meat base items give the best Food/stats

Veggies and veggie base foods dont give smell.

Bleeding, sweating from running, dysentery and laceration give off smell.

You get dirty over time from sweat, gore, Dirt, etc and you gotta clean yourself with diving in water, using water from a JAR, OR soap

love this idea!!

 

[Khissi]

I like the new system. Remember when the only food we could actually carry with was blueberry pies or cans of crap? Seriously... this was well thought out and, though a bit weird in places, like distance for eating veggies, it's not unbelievable. I mean, your body reacts with pheromones' when you eat... pheromones' that seem to enrage and beckon to zombies. I'm okay with that. Besides, how hard is it to have lunch near a river? Quick dip and you're off.

Being able to wrap your meat is a plus, and, though I do understand that some people can never be happy with anything other than exactly what they were hoping for, I'm okay with this change. The old system was infinitely less immersive and probably much easier to code but certainly more annoying. The combo of smell and hot/cold is giving me actual grins. Now, my only real wish is a combo learn by doing/books getting rid of the magazine system for the most part, but this smell system? It's good. Besides, you can always just disable it.

 

[4sheetzngeegles]

The things I look at are the whys, and the responses that follow.

The original smell system, was perfect in the original iteration
but for those versions. Mainly I see it that way is because, at that
time there was a lot less ability and focus on base building, and
was more a player vs unnatural nature. Performance wise, there were
less objects, pois, weather calculations, basically it was raw, and
the majority of time spent was catered to mobility. With a lot more
entities out and about.

The new smell system, has come in when there are a ton of pois, stationary
objects, shaders, Particle generators for fog and storms, more detailed animations,
extremely detailed entities, highly detailed lighting and terrain texturing,
and calculations that are needed now to keep the engine running. Back then the total
size of what was being loaded was approx 3.7 gig, now it's 5 1/2 times that size, getting
checked and loaded, because that is what was wanted.

So the way I looked at it is that there are two modes of play, described in your post,
Sedentary, and Mobile Nomad. Sedentary revolves around base building, The question I
would ask for that is, if cooking in that style which is usually at the base, drew a
constant barrage of zombies to that location, what would be the majority of the player
responses? As a reference I use the responses to screamers, Where are they now?

The other end of the spectrum is Mobile nomadic, which revolves around temp settlements
and remote campfires for cooking.

This next part refers back to the older version and newer version. I agree that for each
of these play styles reversing the scent generation would work with it.

Why was it done this way, I can only guess, but I think it has to do with another
conversation regarding the amount of entity spawn. Which translates into distance between
spawned entities unless modded. Usually, but not always in the game we eat just before we
go out exploring, or while we are out exploring.

The efficient way to make it viable, was to extend the distance smell affects when traveling
or it would be rendered moot. So I don't think it's about spilling food on yourself but more
about making it work for the new environment as simply as possible.

It could be an additional menu choice, Sedentary/Nomadic. That switches the intensities, this
way all three sides would benefit. Nomad, Base Builder, and TFP on the back end regarding push back.

If you build a hierarchy for genres included in this game, It come back to the two branches
Sedentary/Nomadic and sprouts from there.

 

[Old Crow]

It is really weird that the act of eating food causes smells at all. Distance seems like a bit much, too.

 

[Riamus]

The smell system is definitely odd in many ways. Enough so that I'll disable it after EXP.

Some ways it could be improved that *might* make me consider using it in the future include, but are not limited to:

• Replace the red nose icon with a normal color one. It looks horrible. And preferably give us options to hide any of these icons that we don't want/need. I don't care what the smell distance is or that there is a smell. There's too much showing there all the time as it is.
• Reduce smell distance. I understand the game reason for it... most zombies are not close enough to notice if the distance isn't really far, so it would negate the smell mechanic a lot of the time, but it just really doesn't make sense to be smelled from that far.
• Remove smell from eating all foods that don't make sense to have a smell (just about anything that isn't meat).
• Reduce smell from eating cooked and canned foods versus holding raw meat. Zombies should be attracted to raw meat far more than any cooked foods or canned foods, especially if you're just eating them.
• Find a better way to wrap up the meat. The way it is now is not obvious to people until they happen to see it in the crafting menu. It should at least be a button when clicking on the raw meat even if you leave it as an option from the crafting menu. And allow wrapping any number of raw meat instead of only sets of 5 so you don't keep raw meat on you. I'm not sure if you have a smell for under 5 raw meat. If not, it's not a big deal, but it just makes sense to be able to wrap all of it.

These changes might not be enough for me to use smell, but it at least makes it more likely that I'd consider it.

 

[Suxar]

I'm okay with that. Besides, how hard is it to have lunch near a river?

This can be difficult. I'm currently playing on the map peregin08k01, and on the third day, I haven't seen a single river or lake. So far, I've only found a small ditch with about half a block of water. And from my experience playing melee, I can tell you that a lot of food goes to waste. For example, when clearing out a weapons factory, I ate 5-6 servings of meat stew during the entire mission.