Scent Tracking

[Evilkyle24]

CM Version (alpha or Regular):
Alpha

Summary (a quick, 2-3 sentence summary):
Allow aliens to smell a host with a command. The command uses plasma and requires the alien to stand still for a short time. It shows a trail of scent where a marine has walked recently.

Benefits (How this will benefit the server and game as a whole):
Aliens navigate by scent in the canon, allowing them to use a 'Scent' command to sniff out nearby marines would assist in hunting with Byond's limited view field. It would also help keep larvae from running into a crowd of marines, because they could smell that they had just walked through.

Details (Description of how you think this would work, the benefits, etc):
Upon using the Scent command, the alien would remain in place for a few seconds while sniffing the air, at the cost of some plasma. This would, for a very short peroid of time, perhaps less than three seconds, show a scent trail where a human had walked by within the last 10 seconds. For runners, it would show where they had been in the last 20 seconds, and for hunters and ravagers, 30. Hunters could also scent as a toggle when stalking at the price of increased plasma and no invisibility, useful for tracking humans to their base or inside of a building.

Scent trails would persist for longer if the marine was wounded, as they are bleeding.

For larvae, this would instead simply tell them if any humans were nearby and their rough direction, as a simple north/south/east/west. No numbers would be given. This would prevent larvae from running into a squad of marines.

Implementation (Optional, if you have an idea how to implement it):
Add a scent command that shows a short lived vapor trail using the jet-pack gas cloud decal, at the cost of plasma.

[Rahlzel]

I'm in favor of this. If not scent, then some kind of indicator that let's Xenos/Preds know that there are humans/monkeys nearby and their direction.

[Aeleto]

This would be nice at late game, when that last human is dragging the round when hiding.

[apophis775]

Approved. We'll look into it.

[TopHatPenguin]

So would this show a scent trail of marines that recently walked around or would you choose from a list of marines?

On another note this would decrease a survivors chance of survival to very slim or not at all, just a thing to keep in mind.

Anyway this seems like a good ideas just maybe a tweak for the survivors maybe in order for survival.

[Gamerofthegame]

It'd kill off hiding in lockers/etc, come to think of it. Which would be a plus.

I see it being rather CPU intensive and ugly, to boot, with some fifty some odd marines running around. Even if it was a light trail maybe eight tiles long you could toggle on and off.

[GingerCultLeader]

I could see survivor survival rates diminish to almost nothing.

[Gamerofthegame]

Survivors really shouldn't just be hiding in a locker anyway, tho.

[GingerCultLeader]

Aliens do religiously check lockers anyways last I checked, especially the main dome ones.

[Sailor Dave]

I could see this getting pretty laggy. Having lots of blood everywhere is already kind of intensive, I think. Now imagine having overlays over EVERY TILE a marine walks on. Not just one marine, but ALL of them.

[Snypehunter007]

Moved to the new GitLab suggestion system.