I wrote the Hearing entry when the sound system was a few days old. It has been the thing I keep coming back to, and this week I spent a whole day on it and changed four things. This is the log catching up with the part of the game it is built around.
Two reaches, and only what you can’t see
Every noise used to have one loudness, and that one number decided both how far a survivor heard it and how far a zombie heard it. That was wrong in both directions. A groan should carry to you from well past where you can see, because a groan you can’t hear is a zombie you didn’t know about, but a groan should pull no zombie at all, because the dead don’t follow each other. Footsteps are the opposite: they draw the dead from further than another survivor would notice them. So now each kind of sound has a reach for people and a reach for zombies, set separately. A sound is loud or quiet at its source, and it fades on the way to you.
The second change is that you don’t hear what you can see. The sound log used to fill up with groans from zombies standing in plain view, and that told you nothing you didn’t already have. Now a sound from something in your line of sight never reaches the log. The log is strictly for what is out of sight: behind a wall, round a corner, past the edge of the dark.
Walls leak, and a crowd is one line
The third is that walls leak. Until now a survivor inside a building heard nothing at all, which I described in the Buildings entry as the blind spot and half meant as a feature. It was too much. A crowd could gather at the door in total silence. Now what’s outside reaches you through the walls, muffled: about half as far as it would carry on the street, from the direction it came from, and a sound on another floor of your building comes as above or below. So a loud or close thing gets through, the chewing at the door, a gunshot outside, and the faint distant ones don’t. You’re still in a blind spot, just not a deaf one.
The fourth is the murmur. A dozen zombies in a tight group used to send a dozen groans to your log every few seconds, from roughly the same direction, and the log became a wall of the same word. Now the ambient sounds, the groans and the shuffling, fold together by direction: everything from the east becomes one line with how loud it is. A crowd reads as “groan, E, loud”, one line, not fifty. Sharp events stay individual: a gunshot, a door breaking, a shout. Those happened once, so they get a line each.
Together the four turn the log from a list of noises into a picture of the street you can’t see, which is what the Hearing entry was reaching for with twenty zombies in the log and no answer.
The doubt is that the murmur might say too much. “Groan, E, loud” is a count in disguise, and I don’t want the log to become a threat meter you read instead of a city you listen to. The murmur is deliberately vague about distance and deliberately sure about direction. Whether that’s the right amount of vague, I can’t tell from one crowd.