Experimental build: Radial menus and a new hearing system

Video games

Radial menus

You can now pull up a radial menu that lists all of the actions you can currently perform.

• With mouse + keyboard
  • Hold T to open the menu.
  • Move your mouse to select an action.
  • Click to perform the action.
  • Release T to cancel.
• With a controller
  • Hold the left bumper to open the menu.
  • Use the right stick to pick an action.
  • Release the right stick to perform the action.
  • Release the left bumper to cancel.

The UX still needs some tweaking. I keep accidentally performing actions with a controller.

I’ll be adding the ability to target a specific entity later, which should make things more manageable.

New hearing system

Hearing now uses physical sound units (decibels!). Entities can only hear a sound if it is:

• Above their noise floor. They can’t hear anything under the noise floor.
• Not too much quieter than the loudest noise being heard. You can’t hear quiet footsteps if you’re standing right next to a revving engine!

To help convey this, I’ve added two sound meters to the HUD. They’re not very intuitive yet…

• The bottom-left one shows you how loud you’re being relative to your environment. When the meter is full, you’re being much louder than your environment.
• The bottom-right one shows you how loud you are from the POV of your “rival” – for example, in the Pursuit game mode, the non-player character is the rival.
  • If the meter fills up halfway, they can barely hear you
  • If the meter fills up entirely, they can very clearly hear you

So, some important things to think about:

• If an enemy is near a source of loud noise, it can’t hear you very well at all, no matter where you are
• If you’re near a source of loud noise, your footsteps will be covered up, no matter where the listener is

The Dev Room features a VERY LOUD CUBE (actually only 70 decibels) to demonstrate this. Try sneaking, walking, and running near and far from the cube!

Other stuff

• Entities will only investigate a specific source of noise once. This prevents Fen from staring at the VERY LOUD CUBE forever
• Dynamic resolution is only enabled if you switch to the “Fixed” or “Automatic” settings. Previously, it was turned on even when you had the feature disabled. This was causing some color banding.
• Pursuit mode is the default again.
• I discovered that I had two spatializer effects in FMOD. This reduced sound quality somewhat. That has been fixed.
• When you view an entity in first-person, parts of the head are faded out to prevent the head from clipping into the camera. This was causing weird problems with shadows – you’d see a hole in your head! This has been corrected.
• Spatial audio sources now fade in and out a little more smoothly as they get blocked by walls (and when they get unblocked)