Hello, as far as I know, plates are purely decorational item that doesnt serve any purpose, nor looks good when “under” the food. Positioning any dish “on” plate is supper finicky, and although you can decorate tables with it quite well, its very tedious process.
My idea:
plates are containers for food
you can eat of the plate, and leave plate behind
respriting all dishes to remove plates is too much work - all dishes that have plates by default take additional plate in their cooking recepie - I believe bowls work like that
plates with food can normally be broken and leave broken plate with food that they held / they magically grind food and leave only puddle on the ground - like clown pies
large plates accept all types of solid food, but small plates are reserved for food cut into small portions, or other small food Im not yet aware of.
What would that change:
food would not be just laying on the ground/kitchen counter
more crew-chef interactions as plates would have to be brought back to the kitchen
Its definitely not an original idea, but I couldnt find any mentions of it on the github(during 1s search xd). Has it been tried before, or just nobody really cared about kitchen/food gaming that much? If there are any suggestions how plates could be changed, to make them remotely useful, please tell.
Looking at some yaml, it seems lite it was planned at some point in 2021 but I guess nothing has been done since.
After looking for more than one second,
19476 seems to have been adding this, but it was abandoned - also I’m not too sure about the entire food on plates gives more nourishment, If anything it would be better to make some FoodOnGroundGoesBadSystem.
3436 is too big for me to comprehend, and its old, but it has food on the plates on the picture!
I guess the best course of action would be to just step in for 19476 and split only the food on plate putting part. Food poisoning, probably should wait until next week when newmed gets added, or there is bigger discussion how food should go bad if it should be.
EDIT: finished last sentence in the first paragraph.
Making recipes require a plate sounds very arbitrary (Please let me have my pocket spaghetti!)
I would argue that all food should have a plate-less sprite and simply have its icon be pasted on top of a plate’s when added to one.
We can do it like with displacement maps work for clothing, if people want to make a plate specific sprite, they can do so, and if that is not available, the displacement map is used as a fallback.
Gross, but ok.
I guess, from the most food sprites plate can be easily imagemagicked out, only the copypasta would require some consideration as:
sprite and animation could be changed to only make the pasta being copied.
above, but current animation is kept, and they are being switched based on if pasta is on plate or not.
new sprite is made without plate, but on animation, pasta on top always has plate - lazy and probably will rise more problems than its trying to solve.
Anyway
I forgot burger towers exist, and they technically function like the (edible) plates described above. I guess, right now with some yaml we already could have these plates working, but I need to look bit more closely at it. On the other side, if plates were behaving like buns, if any plate were labeled, or had some other unique components attached to it, these would be pain to transfer onto the plate that would be left form eating. Maybe it would suffice to just extract the procedular sprite data into more generic component, and have PlateOrSomethingComponent deal with holding information about what food was put on the plate?