Visual sound effects for ambient sounds

[Joshua]

There are already visual sound effects for various actions (firing weapons, doors, garrisons).

Could there be something for ambient sounds like nearby (loud) machines? It could look cool and also be helpful in finding them with the sound turned down (I am thinking of the network hubs in particular).

[Kyzrati]

I do already have a rudimentary feature for displaying these which you may have seen in some of my debugging screenshots, but properly visualizing these is actually pretty processor intensive. Although it does look pretty neat, it would greatly interfere with lots of other much more important visual markers, so this is not something that will be added to the release version, no.

Actually the full visualization is also too much information that the player shouldn't have, anyway--you shouldn't know about sounds in spaces other than where you're currently standing, so there's really no area to visualize and it doesn't look as cool as all that

But that leads to this:

also be helpful in finding them with the sound turned down

This is a separate issue for which I've been considering an alternative approach for a while now: adding closed captioning for all sound effects. It's actually been on my todo list for years at this point, but it's way down at the bottom since no one's ever talked about this before, just me thinking about it

[Kyzrati]

Resurrecting this old thread to point out that the "Audio Log" is one of the big features in Beta 10. I wrote an article about it on the blog: Audio Accessibility Features for Roguelikes.

[Joshua]

Resurrecting this old thread to point out that the "Audio Log" is one of the big features in Beta 10. I wrote an article about it on the blog: Audio Accessibility Features for Roguelikes.

Yes. I turned it on immediately once it was available. It also helps with faint sounds that I have trouble hearing over louder, closer ones.

[Kyzrati]

Yeah definitely turns out to be quite useful regardless of your setup. Would probably be on by default if not for the desire to avoid blasting new players with just way too much information, but at least it made it into the main options menu so it's easier to find