[REQUEST] Scent and Smell Mod

[Littletree34]

Hello, I'm once again returning to see if there would be anyone willing to invest a little time into creating a scent/smell mod. I've always been a big into smells, I think that the visual representation of such things would do a lot for people like myself. I want to pitch a few ideas for the mod that I think might even intrigue someone who may not be into this sort of thing because I do think that there is a lot of potential for a mod like this. But I'll start with the basics of the visual concept. Ideally the scent would be represented with a fog overlay emanating from the body in different colors to represent different smells. While many of these would emanate from specific parts of the body over time; armpits, groin, backside, feet, maybe even the entire body. There are other ways that this mod could be implemented to create a more immersive smelly experience throughout skyrim. Adding in the ability to smell and track enemies, items and quests. These overlays can depict different smells ranging from good to bad. Examples might include:

• Pink - Perfume
• Purple - Pheromones/aroused
• Blue - Flowery
• White - Smelling sweaty 
• Yellow - Cheese Like
• Green - Rancid
• Red - Blood/Gore
• Black - Death/Rot

These scents and colors could be stacked on top of one another creating an array of different smells to imagine. The reason why this mod has so much potential is because of the way smells are so closely intertwined with memory. Simply seeing a color and a text up in the corner giving a brief description of what your character is smelling is enough to spark the memory of what something smells like to a person, creating a whole new level of immersion. I have a few ideas of how this might work on a few different scales. How it might work on the more NSFW side of things along with how it would work from a gameplay perspective. In my opinion truly great NSFW mods are the ones that also contribute to the game as a whole. With that, having the ability to customize the mod in the mod menu is guaranteed to satisfy all sorts of people with different tastes. I'll list the major gameplay changes first.

 

A shout where the character enters into a "sniffing the air" animation, suddenly everything is colorized with an aroma like fog. Everything from mutilated bodies to pesky hidden mushrooms and alchemy supplies, to hunting trails for prey. An enhanced version of this skill could be given to beast races, allowing them to see/smell scents from further away. Simply tap the spell off and your character is no longer paying attention to the smells around them. Simply add a menu for ticking the types of smells you're not interested in seeing. Large scale you could even have NPC's use this skill to add an extra layer of difficulty while sneaking.

 

The idea is that less pleasant smells would operate similar to mods like wet function redux or bathing in skyrim. Certain smells would dissipate over time while others do not. For instance perfume smells may go away after a few hours after you use a perfume or eat certain ingredients. While other smells may get worse, in progression, from the smell of sweat, to a cheesy scent, to a rancid scent. Or even from a bloody smell after combat, and eventually the smell of death and rot. The smell of lust may grow stronger over time, turning from light purple to royal purple. As you may be able to tell this has a lot of potential for NSFW implementation, for instance, some NPCs may be attracted to different smells. One might be attracted to the scent of sweat, one might be easily aroused by perfumes, vampires could be turned on and jump you at the smell of blood on you, drauger and animals could be attracted to death and rot smells. Pheromones could act as indicators of an NPC's arousal level (imagine literally sniffing out an aroused woman/man in the local tavern).

 

As you can see, the potential of a mod like this is huge an I would be happy to spit ball ideas with anyone who may be interested in creating a mod like this. 

Edited August 29, 2021 by Littletree34

[Seijin8]

1 hour ago, Littletree34 said:

Hello, I'm once again returning to see if there would be anyone willing to invest a little time into creating a scent/smell mod. I've always been a big into smells, I think that the visual representation of such things would do a lot for people like myself. I want to pitch a few ideas for the mod that I think might even intrigue someone who may not be into this sort of thing because I do think that there is a lot of potential for a mod like this. But I'll start with the basics of the visual concept. Ideally the scent would be represented with a fog overlay emanating from the body in different colors to represent different smells. While many of these would emanate from specific parts of the body over time; armpits, groin, backside, feet, maybe even the entire body. There are other ways that this mod could be implemented to create a more immersive smelly experience throughout skyrim. Adding in the ability to smell and track enemies, items and quests. These overlays can depict different smells ranging from good to bad. Examples might include:

• Pink - Perfume
• Purple - Pheromones/aroused
• Blue - Flowery
• White - Smelling sweaty 
• Yellow - Cheese Like
• Green - Rancid
• Red - Blood/Gore
• Black - Death/Rot

These scents and colors could be stacked on top of one another creating an array of different smells to imagine. The reason why this mod has so much potential is because of the way smells are so closely intertwined with memory. Simply seeing a color and a text up in the corner giving a brief description of what your character is smelling is enough to spark the memory of what something smells like to a person, creating a whole new level of immersion. I have a few ideas of how this might work on a few different scales. How it might work on the more NSFW side of things along with how it would work from a gameplay perspective. In my opinion truly great NSFW mods are the ones that also contribute to the game as a whole. With that, having the ability to customize the mod in the mod menu is guaranteed to satisfy all sorts of people with different tastes. I'll list the major gameplay changes first.

 

A shout where the character enters into a "sniffing the air" animation, suddenly everything is colorized with an aroma like fog. Everything from mutilated bodies to pesky hidden mushrooms and alchemy supplies, to hunting trails for prey. An enhanced version of this skill could be given to beast races, allowing them to see/smell scents from further away. Simply tap the spell off and your character is no longer paying attention to the smells around them. Simply add a menu for ticking the types of smells you're not interested in seeing. Large scale you could even have NPC's use this skill to add an extra layer of difficulty while sneaking.

 

The idea is that less pleasant smells would operate similar to mods like wet function redux or bathing in skyrim. Certain smells would dissipate over time while others do not. For instance perfume smells may go away after a few hours after you use a perfume or eat certain ingredients. While other smells may get worse, in progression, from the smell of sweat, to a cheesy scent, to a rancid scent. Or even from a bloody smell after combat, and eventually the smell of death and rot. The smell of lust may grow stronger over time, turning from light purple to royal purple. As you may be able to tell this has a lot of potential for NSFW implementation, for instance, some NPCs may be attracted to different smells. One might be attracted to the scent of sweat, one might be easily aroused by perfumes, vampires could be turned on and jump you at the smell of blood on you, drauger and animals could be attracted to death and rot smells. Pheromones could act as indicators of an NPC's arousal level (imagine literally sniffing out an aroused woman/man in the local tavern).

 

As you can see, the potential of a mod like this is huge an I would be happy to spit ball ideas with anyone who may be interested in creating a mod like this. 

 

Its not a bad idea and I toyed with something similar a long while ago before giving up on it.

 

Speaking just to the "visuals as smells", there are a few major problems with it:

1. When colors overlap, they lose any distinction and can create "false colors" that are incorrect.
2. There are many backgrounds (snow, ocean, warm firelight) that can make colors change intensity/alter their meaning (easiest analogy: green lightsabers in a desert look yellow).  If the colors can change then any useful information they could provide is lost.
3. I got around that (somewhat) by removing all other background colors when in this "mode", but even then color contrasts and overlaps muddled the information.  Using it in a moderately busy place eliminated any value it had through overlap.  Using it in the Bannered Mare at night looked like an acid trip.
4. The only way this could function reliably is if the information were kept to an absolute minimum, and there was no possibility of confusion from bleed-over or color imperfections.  At that stage, it begs the question of what use it even was anymore.
5. I toyed with making two palettes, one just very simple and another complex, and only when the crosshair was over the target would the complex stuff come into existence (it was all particle effects like aura whisper).  This worked better, but the on/off had a small delay and in a moving environment, you could easily lose track of which character you were looking at/receiving info from.  That wouldn't be an issue IRL since you wouldn't have to supplant another sense to get the info, but in this... not so much.
6. Keeping very tight overlays (like some variations of night vision or thermal vision mods) worked a little better for very specific colors (based on background contrast), but looked cartoonish; generally like badly-colored cell-shading.

 

In the end the technical hurdles of trying to represent one sense with another weren't worth the many hours I'd already put into it.

 

An option that could work, and that I never put into play, would be selecting a specific scent to track, and having a clairvoyance-like mechanism for that scent if it is present.  This loses a lot of the value of what information should be available, but at least it would be functional in a gameplay sense without being muddled.

 

The second big hurdle is making this information relevant to the specific NPC since that requires a system to track and correlate data from what they are doing.  For things that are regularly tracked (arousal for instance) this isn't an issue, but cleanliness?  You would have to create a system for that.  In essence, you would need to have a cloak effect or quest running for every single scent you might want to track since they would need legacy information to be relevant.  That is a lot of performance overhead all the time for something you might only use very infrequently.

 

No doubt there's ways around all this, but in the end, I didn't feel the muddled results were worth the effort.

 

Hopefully someone proves me wrong.

Edited August 29, 2021 by Seijin8

[Littletree34]

15 hours ago, Seijin8 said:

 

Its not a bad idea and I toyed with something similar a long while ago before giving up on it.

 

Speaking just to the "visuals as smells", there are a few major problems with it:

1. When colors overlap, they lose any distinction and can create "false colors" that are incorrect.
2. There are many backgrounds (snow, ocean, warm firelight) that can make colors change intensity/alter their meaning (easiest analogy: green lightsabers in a desert look yellow).  If the colors can change then any useful information they could provide is lost.
3. I got around that (somewhat) by removing all other background colors when in this "mode", but even then color contrasts and overlaps muddled the information.  Using it in a moderately busy place eliminated any value it had through overlap.  Using it in the Bannered Mare at night looked like an acid trip.
4. The only way this could function reliably is if the information were kept to an absolute minimum, and there was no possibility of confusion from bleed-over or color imperfections.  At that stage, it begs the question of what use it even was anymore.
5. I toyed with making two palettes, one just very simple and another complex, and only when the crosshair was over the target would the complex stuff come into existence (it was all particle effects like aura whisper).  This worked better, but the on/off had a small delay and in a moving environment, you could easily lose track of which character you were looking at/receiving info from.  That wouldn't be an issue IRL since you wouldn't have to supplant another sense to get the info, but in this... not so much.
6. Keeping very tight overlays (like some variations of night vision or thermal vision mods) worked a little better for very specific colors (based on background contrast), but looked cartoonish; generally like badly-colored cell-shading.

 

In the end the technical hurdles of trying to represent one sense with another weren't worth the many hours I'd already put into it.

 

An option that could work, and that I never put into play, would be selecting a specific scent to track, and having a clairvoyance-like mechanism for that scent if it is present.  This loses a lot of the value of what information should be available, but at least it would be functional in a gameplay sense without being muddled.

 

The second big hurdle is making this information relevant to the specific NPC since that requires a system to track and correlate data from what they are doing.  For things that are regularly tracked (arousal for instance) this isn't an issue, but cleanliness?  You would have to create a system for that.  In essence, you would need to have a cloak effect or quest running for every single scent you might want to track since they would need legacy information to be relevant.  That is a lot of performance overhead all the time for something you might only use very infrequently.

 

No doubt there's ways around all this, but in the end, I didn't feel the muddled results were worth the effort.

 

Hopefully someone proves me wrong.

 

Thank for taking the time to respond to my post. I'm having some trouble grasping all of the things at play here. For one I'm a bit confused on why the background would be such a big issue. I would think that a lot of this would depend on the physical representation or the shape/density/opacity of the scent being depicted. I did see one suggestion floating around on another forum about potentially using assets that are already in game. For example the ebony mail effect that has darkness emanating from the armor, there are also certain magics, even fire could have its color and opacity adjusted to give off the effect. I don't frequently see in-game assets like this too heavily impacted by background because they seem to be dense enough to mitigate that. Even candle smoke or fire smoke could help with this. While I completely understand what you mean by the scale and the wealth of information that the game would have to handle I think your idea for a clairvoyance type effect has some potential in reducing that. For things like cleanliness would there be a way to sort of piggy back off mods that already have similar features like bathing in skyrim or keep it clean? Also similar to mods like wet function redux you have the option to track the wetness or sweat on specific NPC's simply having the option to track the NPC you're interested in tracking could reduce the strain on performance.

[Seijin8]

50 minutes ago, Littletree34 said:

For one I'm a bit confused on why the background would be such a big issue.

 

What would a white scent (or light blue) look like against a snowy backdrop?  It wouldn't be visible.  Same with many colors during specific times of day, or based on ENB settings, or how much bloom/how blown out a particular preset is, etc.  If the colors glow (like you can see them in the dark), you need a way to offset the game's natural brightness adaptation, or using scent will temporarily destroy your night vision, etc.  There are a lot of odd interactions with any kind of "aura mechanism" being used.  The more colors/different styles you want to use with that, the more often you'll run into problems.

 

50 minutes ago, Littletree34 said:

For example the ebony mail effect that has darkness emanating from the armor, there are also certain magics, even fire could have its color and opacity adjusted to give off the effect.

 

Those are particle effects, and that is what I was using.  The issue comes when you have more than one going at the same time, as they block each other out or cause odd colors where they mix.

 

50 minutes ago, Littletree34 said:

I don't frequently see in-game assets like this too heavily impacted by background because they seem to be dense enough to mitigate that.

 

Again, used one at a time, they work fine, it is layering them that generates the problems.

 

50 minutes ago, Littletree34 said:

For things like cleanliness would there be a way to sort of piggy back off mods that already have similar features like bathing in skyrim or keep it clean?

 

Yes, and if you have a mod already tracking that, it should be easy to just get the conditional information from that mod (depending on how the mod tracks it; arousal uses a faction system which is easily utilized for this, but other mods may use entirely script-based mechanisms which would then need to be converted into something like a faction system.)

 

50 minutes ago, Littletree34 said:

Also similar to mods like wet function redux you have the option to track the wetness or sweat on specific NPC's simply having the option to track the NPC you're interested in tracking could reduce the strain on performance.

 

If you made it so that the system only allowed you to get strong (detailed) scents from one person at a time, and it was only using readily available data (and not having to track anything itself), then there would be little performance impact (beyond what those type mods are already generating).

 

My original project for this was to use scent auras in crowded areas for a succubus playthrough to easily find good targets.  It sometimes worked, but the more informational detail I wanted, the more cluttered and unusable the whole thing became.  I eventually just settled for tracking a modified arousal level (undead have lower output, wrong gender have lower output, etc) and had it make scent trails (clairvoyance-like).  The idea being you could find the "highest arousal/best victim" in an area and locate them by scent (combined with flying mods) anywhere in the hold, effectively hunting them.

 

It... kinda worked once I took out all the secondary information, but ultimately the end product had only a fraction of what I wanted it to have, so I put it aside.

Edited August 30, 2021 by Seijin8

[dePog]

Was just looking to see if I had put my mod onto Lovers Lab as well as Nexus, and I saw this post. While my mod is not exactly what you suggested, it may interest you

Fertility Mode - Additional Scents

However, it is just an add mod that requires you to have first installed Fertility Mode and FM Fixes and Tweaks