improve combat sound behavior

[rashadnaqeeb]

Currently, a beep is played when enemies are within 100 tiles. this beep is replaced when particularly large enemies, or many enemies, are in close proximity to the player. playing a different sound is confusing and leads to audio clutter. Additionally, The game already provides unique footstep and growl sounds for bigger enemies, and it's quite easy to hear that you're being attacked by many enemies.

Instead, I suggest that the current beep for enemies within 100 tiles be repurposed to provide more proximity info. My suggestion is that it starts playing at 3 second intervals, and increases in frequency by 0.3 seconds for every 10 tiles, so for example it would play every 1.5 seconds if an enemy was 50 tiles away.

The aimlock sound should be removed, as it does not provide any useful information to the player and plays too frequently.

The high pitched beep, when the player encounters an object but is not prevented from walking through it, should also be removed. it's confusing and unintuitive, because it is very similar to the beep played when movement is prevented. It also isn't actionable information to the player, who can still walk in that direction.

If possible, the damage sounds for being attacked by biters should be distinct from the sounds of damage from standing in fire/an acid puddle. Because the latter is continuous, it would be nice if we got a low, easily loopable sound to communicate the info without being overwhelming. If factorio's own sounds can be used, quietly looping something like buzzer3 from the programmable speaker options could work.

[ahicks92]

The "walked past stuff" beep is actionable information for non-combat cases because it indicates that you may have slightly lost the line. When the game lets you e.g. walk through a forest I am pretty sure it does this by making tiny steering corrections. I may be incorrect.

[LevFendi]

The sub-issue of the player bump alert beep was addressed in Update 0.11.1 although I forgot to note that here. The current status is as follows:

Bumping into objects no longer makes an alert beep but you still hear the sound of a striking metal boot or sliding gravel.;

I think this is a fair change because you get the information about the bump without the high intensity alert beep.