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Roccandil

Make hot food cooking more immersive

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Gonna rant a little here. :P I really like the concept of food affinities, but two things really bug me about how HFC is implemented.

 

For starters, stuffing backpacks full of ingredient-filled pans, cramming those into forges, hitting sleep bonus, and waiting for the ticks is for me a serious immersion failure. Yes, that's remotely similar to how we really learn to cook hot food! :P Were I developing this game, I wouldn't stand for it. :) At a minimum, I'd exempt HFC (and any accompanying stats/parent skills) from sleep bonus, and then double all gains associated with HFC.

 

That way, no inherent bonus would exist for panfilling. You could still do it, with the exact same gains as before, and the panfilling market would still exist, but the player who just wants to learn cooking more immersively by making daily meals as needed isn't penalized.

 

(As an unpopular addition, though, I might add a QL penalty to food cooked in a backpack, and possibly even a skillgain penalty. :P To balance that, I might also add a huge oven, with racks, to the game for those who want to cook a -lot- of food at once, which isn't inherently a bad thing.)

 

For seconds, affinities are really cool, but the ability to just look them up is in my view a huge spoiler. Again, at a minimum I would obfuscate affinities, making it impossible to predict them, while at the same time. to preserve food shops, make affinity combinations discovered independent of the player.

 

That is, if I make a meditation meal, it -is- a meditation meal for anyone who eats it. It doesn't matter that the steps taken to get there will be different than someone else's. That way players can either explore their own affinity-building mechanics, or simply buy what they want.

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Hmm, just have to point out: I have never done panfilling with such method. I have used 10 frying pans and 10 pottery bowls and filled them in oven one by one all the way up to 88 HFC. :) When done so, I have felt it has been one of the most satisfying skills to level up. Was even more before the cooking update.

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2 hours ago, Roccandil said:

For seconds, affinities are really cool, but the ability to just look them up is in my view a huge spoiler. Again, at a minimum I would obfuscate affinities, making it impossible to predict them, while at the same time. to preserve food shops, make affinity combinations discovered independent of the player.

Im sorry but u do no have to use my tool or other's.
hell it given me over 8 weeks of pure enjoyment figuring it all out and how it worked. i learned how to code inside google docs.(becuz of it)
if you don't use the the tools its is hard to figure out with out a lot of experimenting.(math is the key).

-

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Making affinities both unpredictable and reproducible is pretty much mutually exclusive, and I'll rather have them remain reproducible. I prefer finding my affinities by experimentation myself aswell, but to each their own.

 

I can't really agree that making only the neccessary is being "penalized" either...if you're doing it less, you gain less experience in it, panfilling or not. That's only fair.

 

I don't think this would be particularly more immersive anyway. In both cases, you just drop your food in a container and it's going by itself, that's awfully noninteractive except for the food preparation, wether you make 1 or 100 meals.

What would improve both immersion and reward for people doing only a few meals, but presumably paying more attention to them, is introducing some interactions usually associated with cooking:

-Stirring soups (With a spoon?)

-Flipping ingredients in frying pans (Fork?)

-Perhaps post cooking seasoning that don't change the affinity, but provide an additional action?

-More obvious ideas I can't think of because I'm as creative as a brick. Every cooking container should have something like this, but might need some brainstorming to come up with something at least somewhat sensible for each.

 

These actions could be analoguous to tending your fields, increasing QL of the resulting meal a bit and giving experience for the additional interactions. I think that'd be a good compromise as it doesn't tamper with what you can do now by cooking en masse, while adding rewards to those wanting to cook less but spend more time actively on the meal for the sake of immersion or plain preference. Kind of enabling both the quantity and the quality approach to skilling HFC.

Edited by Flubb
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2 hours ago, Flubb said:

 

I can't really agree that making only the neccessary is being "penalized" either...if you're doing it less, you gain less experience in it, panfilling or not. That's only fair.

 

This has nothing to do with getting less experience because you're cooking less. One hundred meals all at once is way more sleep bonus efficient than one hundred meals, one after the other.

 

The fundamental issue is that you can do up front work to parallelize the skillgain. -That's- the problem, and I'm not sure any other skill is like that. (Panfilling is what I would call an "uncanny valley" exploit. Wurm feels pretty realistic in general, which means something as unrealistic as this is enough to bring me up short and go "ew". :P )

 

In line with your suggestions, however, another way to fix this would be to make cooking more like Repairing, where you get constant cooking ticks while something is cooking. Since you only have so much attention you can devote to cooking, cooking more meals at the same time doesn't inherently increase tick rate/size (although it could increase difficulty).

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Not sure if I find it that problematic that sleep bonus can be used efficiently so much, but fair enough, point taken.

 

14 hours ago, Roccandil said:

In line with your suggestions, however, another way to fix this would be to make cooking more like Repairing, where you get constant cooking ticks while something is cooking. Since you only have so much attention you can devote to cooking, cooking more meals at the same time doesn't inherently increase tick rate/size (although it could increase difficulty).

 

 

That would be simpler than what I suggested in theory, and I like the concept per se, but it sounds inpractical in terms of implementation if I try to wrap my head around what to do to achieve this.

You could get a corresponding fraction of the tick each time all ingredients in the container progress to the next heat stage, but that's computationally very heavy, and Xanalag already induced a slight breaking of meal updates to make performance viable.

Devs could drastically reduce the footprint of this mechanism by aggregating each started meal in a container as an "uncooked" version (once the container is warm) and just checking on that, but then you'd have to keep track of how far an uncooked meal has been cooked somehow to prevent exploits by panfilling in an oven and lighting it so it's just shy of cooking the meals, letting the meals cool off, reigniting the oven, etc. That's potentially a lot of meta information to store when keeping track of every single uncooked meal. I'm not trying to be a party pooper, but this is what I imagine the devs would have to consider in this, and so should we then.

 

Either way, when it comes to improving immersion I find interacting with the meal as I suggested above more adaequate and solves the issue with less headache, since, as you correctly said, one can only attend to so many meals. That'd mean that the interactions I suggested could still be done by panfillers, but they'd only get to stir so many soups and flip so many burgers before all the other meals are already done, so it remains a bonus for few meals cooked at a time.

Edited by Flubb

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3 hours ago, Flubb said:

Not sure if I find it that problematic that sleep bonus can be used efficiently so much, but fair enough, point taken.

 

Well, the issue I'm taking is that the game is actively encouraging non-immersive behavior. I know what I need to do skill up HFC, but I really don't want to (and not because it's hard or because I don't have the time/mats); it just takes me out of the game too much.

 

3 hours ago, Flubb said:

 

 

 

That would be simpler than what I suggested in theory, and I like the concept per se, but it sounds inpractical in terms of implementation if I try to wrap my head around what to do to achieve this.

You could get a corresponding fraction of the tick each time all ingredients in the container progress to the next heat stage, but that's computationally very heavy, and Xanalag already induced a slight breaking of meal updates to make performance viable.

Devs could drastically reduce the footprint of this mechanism by aggregating each started meal in a container as an "uncooked" version (once the container is warm) and just checking on that, but then you'd have to keep track of how far an uncooked meal has been cooked somehow to prevent exploits by panfilling in an oven and lighting it so it's just shy of cooking the meals, letting the meals cool off, reigniting the oven, etc. That's potentially a lot of meta information to store when keeping track of every single uncooked meal. I'm not trying to be a party pooper, but this is what I imagine the devs would have to consider in this, and so should we then.

 

Either way, when it comes to improving immersion I find interacting with the meal as I suggested above more adaequate and solves the issue with less headache, since, as you correctly said, one can only attend to so many meals. That'd mean that the interactions I suggested could still be done by panfillers, but they'd only get to stir so many soups and flip so many burgers before all the other meals are already done, so it remains a bonus for few meals cooked at a time.

 

I see what you're saying. Repairing skillgain works all right, but it's active/foreground, not passive/background, and it's that passive/background characteristic which makes skillgain-parallelization possible -and- makes cooking a server hog.

 

Ah well. I don't even know how I would try to make HFC entirely active. "Quantum cooking" would certainly alleviate server strain, but we don't automatically change a uncooked pie into something done by poking a fork in it, so I dunno what that would do for immersion. :)

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While I'm thinking about it, I'll add that when I thought of your meal interaction idea in the context of imping, I really liked it. :) So, depending on the meal, we might have spices, salt, spoon, water, sauce, etc. for imping its QL while it's cooking (making the finished product much better than a normal meal).

 

Also importantly, imping would naturally provide imp-level HFC exp, whereas the finished product would only give creation-level exp.

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47 minutes ago, Roccandil said:

I'll add that when I thought of your meal interaction idea in the context of imping, I really liked it. :)

 

Please lets not do that, i mean one of the reasons i love cooking is because it's NOT imping. Not that there's anything wrong with imping but variety is the spice of life and more varied "mini-games" are, for me, much much better.

 

As for immersion, i think perhaps one of the first steps to increase immersion is simply to look again at the recipes .... as someone pointed out to me a few days ago ... as a starter player you know some of the more complex recipes but you don't know the recipe for roasting vegetables .... (and lets please just remember there are systems that need revisiting more urgently than cooking).

 

Frankly i think this is firmly in the realms of a mod for WU, where the recipes are re-written/revisted and any minor refinements to the existing mechanics could possibly be made and then let the dev team to see it, assess it and see if they wanna steal ... erm borrow anything from it?

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23 hours ago, Ratlin said:

 

Please lets not do that, i mean one of the reasons i love cooking is because it's NOT imping. Not that there's anything wrong with imping but variety is the spice of life and more varied "mini-games" are, for me, much much better.

 

I didn't imagine it as classical imping anyway, as in: Creation QL is 1/5 of the skill max, and then your skill only enables you to push the product to that level. That'd make cooking way too tedious. I was thinking more in terms of a slight QL boost, maybe up to HFC/10 QL points, to give more of an incentive to the interactions than just XP for those who don't want to do panfilling.

 

Other systems may need more attention right now, but that doesn't invalidate bringing up suggestions to this one. It's to the devs discretion what they prioritise. The starting recipes do seem arbitrary though, I can agree with that...I was thinking way too complicated wehne searching for the passata recipe, it was rather frustrating being hung up on such a basic thing.

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