Deafness from noise is out of control

[troll_from_behind]

Yeah, but getting deaf from NPC firing her .22 piperifle?

[Thwap]

Seriously, I’m going deaf from stuff I can’t even find. Milspec turret two screens away shooting a zombie? Deaf.

[Zero]

Yeah, but getting deaf from NPC firing her .22 piperifle?

.22 can be at instant hearing damage levels and can be supersonic, so if she wasn’t much more than a few feet away…

I mean, when I was a kid I fired off a blank in a .22 rifle without ear pro and couldn’t hear for a minute and had ringing for ten. Never did that again!

[troll_from_behind]

[quote=“troll from behind, post:3, topic:9464”]Yeah, but getting deaf from NPC firing her .22 piperifle?

.22 can be at instant hearing damage levels and can be supersonic, so if she wasn’t much more than a few feet away…

I mean, when I was a kid I fired off a blank in a .22 rifle without ear pro and couldn’t hear for a minute and had ringing for ten. Never did that again![/quote]
Yeah, had my share of these, but mostly with pistols, with longer barrels it wasn’t that bad with LR’s.
This npc was firing outside my screen, that would be more than twenty errrr…squares further away.

[Zero]

At that distance, where 20 squares is something like 60 feet, outdoors, I agree that the sound shouldn’t be deafening from a .22.

[Thwap]

It’s ridiculous and stupid. I have to zoom the view out just to find the survivor who’s off behind a tree somewhere firing a shotgun and making me deaf from a city block away.

[John_Candlebury]

Yeah i think the deafness change actually somewhat exaggerated. Firing guns in open spaces isn’t really that loud.

Getting a ringing ears effect that momentarily reduced your hearing distance would be more adequate. And tweaking loudness can probably be considered

[Coolthulhu]

Using the new effects, it would be easy to make a scaling partial deafness effect with intensity tied to duration.

[Rivet]

I agree; the current system is totally out of whack. Short of firing them indoors, none of the guns in DDA should present real danger to one’s hearing.

Actually it’s kinda intended. Gunfire is loud enough in the real world to cause real damage to your hearing if you aren’t wearing ear protection. (Though we probably need to split off a lower level “lesser deafness” effect that limits your ability to hear without actually removing it but lasts for longer periods, instead of giving you total deafness for a few turns.)

[quote=“John Candlebury, post:9, topic:9464”]Yeah i think the deafness change actually somewhat exaggerated. Firing guns in open spaces isn’t really that loud.

Getting a ringing ears effect that momentarily reduced your hearing distance would be more adequate. And tweaking loudness can probably be considered[/quote]

Using the new effects, it would be easy to make a scaling partial deafness effect with intensity tied to duration.

These are good.

[kevin.granade]

It also sounds like the effect needs to drop off more sharply with distance, there’s a big difference between a gun being loud enough to impair hearing at arms-length and it doing so at several meters distance (especially if not enclosed).

[Krazy]

This would explain a lot. I was a good distance from anything I could see from a barricaded house on the edge of town and suddenly I’m deafened for seemingly no reason right in the middle of stitching up my clothing.

[Voqar]

Necroing as I just started messing with experimental (latest build from 9/1 3646) and my character has gone deaf twice already - once I think from a zombie hitting a barred window (from inside a gun shop) - I think.

Now deaf again and no clue how - I was just out looting and hadn’t fought anything in quite a while, made the long trek home and noticed the deafness while unloading the loot. I did get about 20 tiles away from some zombies beating up a turret but it was out of ammo and that had to be at least 40 turns ago. I used the loot manager to move some stuff around - I would hope that didn’t cause it.

Can listening to an mp3 player nonstop cause deafness? I haven’t noticed any messages. I did fire a gun in a basement earlier and saw a msg about it hurting my ears or something but that didn’t cause deafness (or I didn’t notice it).

Touches of realism in video games is neato but I think this deafness mechanic is kind of whacked.

[BeerBeer]

MP3-players don’t cause deafness.
Neither does moving stuff around.
Distant, out-of-screen, building collapses are a good suspect. Tons of noise.

---

The real issue in all this is that ear plugs make the player character 100% deaf. Anyone’s who has ever used earplugs knows this is not the truth. You’ll still hear plenty of (muffled) sounds with them on.

There’s no active battery-powered hearing protection either aka electronic hearing protectors that block loud noises but do allow quiet noises to pass.

A minor issue is that the source of deafness isn’t recorded in the message log, creating confusion.

[Thwap]

I’ve just started wearing earplugs all the time and taking them off when I want to listen for something. I’d rather be able to pop the plugs out and hear when I need to than be deaf half the time randomly with no idea why.

[Random_dragon]

Yes. I’ve said before we need to implement ear plugs causing noise reduction instead of full deafness, AND we need to implement the noise-cancelling effect of the hearing bionic as an item.

Also again, just to add a reminder to prevent the inevitable mistake, electronic noise-canceling stuff should still work as mundane ear protection while off.

[i2amroy]

It also sounds like the effect needs to drop off more sharply with distance, there’s a big difference between a gun being loud enough to impair hearing at arms-length and it doing so at several meters distance (especially if not enclosed).

If we move to a decibel based-system (as we discussed a while back IIRC) that should also make this a bit easier to setup, because we can get some actual math numbers behind things to make it a fair bit more realistic.

[Aluminumfoil]

If you go to a physics-based sound system, I would recommend using a unitless sound power factor, F=(sound at 1m in dB)^10, rather than dB, for everything except for output to the player, so that it can be added, subtracted, and multiplied without jumping through logarithm hoops. Then you can just have:

Sound_n = (1+X)F/(r^2+(k*z)^2)
Total Sound = sum of all Sound_n’s being heard in a given move
Sound_dB = log(total Sound)

where
X is a circumstance-determined fudge factor to approximate reverberation and damping effects using a brief if/and/else block instead of a mountain of acoustic engineer code.
r is the distance to the source in tiles, plus 1 (for the tile you’re standing on)
z is the distance to the source in z-levels, plus 1
k is a factor for converting z-levels to tile-equivalents

[Random_dragon]

Ah, but logarithms are delicious. ;w;

[xpyder]

Yeah but a lot of people don’t get that DB is exponential or have trouble understanding just how quickly it grows (160db is 2x the volume of 150db). I think the power suggestion might be a good one.

Separately I think most of the deafness issues are sound not dropping off quickly enough though. I did some research and it seems that (not accounting for echo, focusing, or sympathetic effects) sound drops off logarithmically not linearly (drops very quickly at first then slower the farther away you are)

“The sound intensity decreases inversely proportional to the squared distance, that is, with 1/r² from the measuring point to the sound source, so that doubling of the distance deceases the sound intensity to a quarter of its initial value.”

So while a gunshot is deafeningly loud right next to your ear and can be hear a mile or more away, being 25+ feet away drops the volume enough not to be dangerous.

[kevin.granade]

The distinction between linear and logarithmic falloff is exactly the distinction i2amroy is getting at by saying we should be representing sound intensity in dB.
Something you might be confused about is the way sound levels are represented in the game (which should DEFINITELY be in dB) versus how it’s displayed to the player, which is a completely separate issue.
I’m leaning toward dB for both, or perhaps an option to toggle the units used for display. I don’t know if there’s a common, non-logarithmic scale for sound intensity though.