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Sense of smell


NoPizzaSad

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Do zombies smell? Since they are rotting they should actually smell quite a bit.

I've always wandered, wouldn't a person know there's something rotting behind a door? The stench of a rotting human will fill an entire house, and even leak out if doors and windows aren't pretty airtight, it would be nice if you could get a mechanic or trait (could develop over time or not) where you feel the smell coming from places with rotting food, corpses and zombies. It would add to sight and hearing as a way to spot possible zombies around you, and could be subtle enough so that you need to be paying close attention in-game, representing keeping your senses sharp in the case of your character.

It could work with visual cues like "smell lines" of a very transparent color coming from the source, or just an indicator that reads what your character is smelling (you'd play hot/cold with it), it would even let you know if there's a large horde in the direction the wind is coming. In real life you can smell corpses at a significant distance if the wind is coming from the direction of the carcass, for a corpse the size of a human this is very considerable, for several humans, well...go figure. If you've ever smelled a truck of rotting bones in real life (they are used for jelly) or a dead cow out in the countryside, you know how powerful the stench is. 

A horde would be smelled from kilometers away if the wind comes from its direction, and it would add a lot of immersion for the player to learn of an incoming threat in such a primitive way.

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That's an interesting perspective, in particular modeling a smell sense "stat / value" on the player character that interacts with the game environment. I'd expect it to require a significant amount of work to implement if ever considered appropriate but nice idea nonetheless.

 

This is something that generally games don't even consider doing other than from a narrative standpoint (a text description or a particular cutscene explaning what the character is experiencing)

 

*on a small note, smokers tend to generally have a diminished perception on their smell and taste compared to non smokers.

Edited by 3lackrose
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  • 4 weeks later...

This is a great idea. You might have a color text indicator within asterisks. Green colored might be rotting food while red is rotting corpses (zombie or just dead). Larger more bold text means a stronger smell and can cause a 'disgusted' moodle. Variants for color blind persons of course (e.g. text within asterisks for rotting food and text between underscores for zombies).

 

Edited by grammarsalad
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There used to be a sandbox option to calibrate the zombie's sense of smell, but they did away with that in the 41.51 update. I expect it never worked as planned, or was just opted against it. Never figured out how that worked. 

 

But I digress.

 

I rather like this idea. Especially smelling herds. Could add some additional functionality to the weather system. The wind direction is already a thing.

 

Is that stank just around the corner? Or is it a mile off? It could havefer a little ambiguity to it. If you were paying attention to the weather on the emergency broadcast for that day, you could get a better idea how far of that stank really is as opposed to just guessing. Could add a little extra stress to surviving the end days.

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