Exercise => Body Heat Mechanic

[railmonkey]

Mentioned it over in my Parkour Practitioner thread, but it seems to me that now that we have stamina implemented, using stamina should generate body heat because, well, that’s how it should work. On that note, survivors seem to entirely lack sweat glands. How plausible would it be to link the two mechanically?

[Agoelia]

It looks not very easy to implement. What actual gameplay mechanics would it imply? What happens when you sweat or get a flu? You get more visible to infrared cameras, sure, but they already can perfectly see you when your temperature is “normal”. Also, I’m not even sure there are enemies that can use your body heat to track you. It seems like a useless feature, correct me if I’m wrong.

[Keyreper]

if you added sweat glands you could lower the amount of water that your character usually uses and have some taken from sweating instead, but I can’t really think of any reasons for a body heat mechanic.

[Coolthulhu]

Could be tedious.

I could see it working as a negative, though. We’d assume that the survivor is shivering, jumping etc. while cold, but no one can stand still while building a building or something like that. So working in the heat of the summer would generate extra useless heat.

As for sweating: “hot” status already causes thirst, it’s just that it doesn’t add any wetness to the body.

[railmonkey]

Default spring start is effectively still winter. Getting your blood pumping would help a lot to tide you over until you can get cold weather gear (or enough layers). As for sweating, at least, that would do its job: Provide a small amount of cooling in hot conditions, including exercise. That’s the main thing I’m interested in. But yeah. It’s a balancing act: Homeostasis. The body actively tries to maintain a normal body temperature range. In cold conditions, without exercise, that means the blood vessels in the extremities constrict and cool in order to concentrate blood flow around the internal organs. If you get a fever, from the flu or otherwise, sweating will act against it to keep your temperature from raising too much. You get chills because your body is technically colder than the temperature the brain sets during the fever.

Why Does Body Temperature Increase During Exercise?

Why Do We Get Chills With a Fever?

EDIT: That’s biology for ya. Sweating works because water takes so much heat to evaporate. When it does evaporate, the sweat takes a ton of body heat with it. That’s why you know you’re in trouble when you stop sweating in ungodly heat. Heat stroke. The whole mechanic isn’t meant to be terribly significant in the long run, but it gives a bit of extra time to address the lack of proper attire and/or other temperature moderation methods.

[kevin.granade]

Mechanically there are a few different implications of this, one is that we already have an adjustment factor in place to the homeostasis code that assumes you’re being fairly active. The main difference when tracking it directly is that when inactive, people are going to get much colder much faster (except when asleep, we already suppress heat generation when asleep), and occasionally (extended manual labor or fighting) will get much warmer, so it will increase the dynamic range of body temperature and your need to manage it.
After living in a cold environment and exercising frequently outside, I have to point out another issue with sweat, if it’s cold enough that you still wear layers of clothes even when exerting yourself, you start getting sweat buildup inside your clothes, which puts you in a pickle if you stop exerting yourself, because your body temperature will absolutely plummet when you stop moving.

These are the effects, I pretty much have how the implementation would work sorted out, it’s mostly a matter of tagging all the places where the player takes action with a call to record how much they’re exerting themselves, probably in a small range of values like “idle”, “moving”, “exerting”, “sprinting” to keep things simple, then updating the body temperature code to take that value into account.

[railmonkey]

True. I wasn’t aware of how extensive that was, actually. And yeah, sweating when cold does suck. My assumption was that by then you’d be equipped enough to let fire do its work. Not always plausible in places like ice labs, but those at least have beds in abundance.

[Hotel_16]

http://news.discovery.com/adventure/survival/extreme-cold-weather-survival-tips-2.htm

referring to above this means during winter survival you should be punished by over-laying clothes during heavy exertion, so say you fought a few zombies during the middle of winter depleted your stamina bar. Now if you had several layers of clothes on/gloves and a scarf/beanie, once safe, the ideal thing to do would be to free you hands and head to dissipate heat perhaps even take off one of your layers to essentially dissipate your into the environment. If you didn’t your clothes would provide less warmth to begin with and your temp would plummet, perhaps in sufficiently cold environments that sweat could freeze providing further FUN ?

This seems like an awesome winter mechanic, avoid overexertion (empty stamina bar) or get a fire asap, with “heat sinking” a risky in between. Perhaps sweating could be a disease ? One with no immunization and and a turn limit curable by body temp in it’s first “stage” ? Furthermore you could give it a third “stage” actionable after 60 turns or so in cold environments ?

[Kryxx]

Sweating would also increase your ‘scent’.

There are clothes designed for exercising that keeps the body from becoming dripping and soaking though. It traps it near the body. I had some for downhill skiing, socks, and a light layer of ‘legging’ style pants, that I wore under my ski pants. The upper body I could manage the layers by unzipping various spots in the sky jacket. There just was times when the @ 10 feet, the deep snow would make you really work.

[kevin.granade]

Yes, that kind of thing is a big help, but it would be balanced by being less tough.