"It may make noise to alert nearby monsters."

[yesno]

When determining how to deal with a monster, it can be helpful to know whether the monster might make noise to wake/attract other monsters. So I suggest adding this info to xv: "It may shout/hiss/gurgle/trumpet/bellow/screech/roar/??? upon noticing you."

As it is now, new players pretty much have to learn and memorize by trial and error. A tarantella or a wolf spider may hiss, but a redback or orb spider won't... Iguanas, adders, geckos, anacondas, and crocodiles don't hiss, but komodos, moccasins, and mambas do... Green rats don't make noise, but hell rats roar... Etc.

[PleasingFungus]

orb spiders do hiss, fwiw

i'm not sure this is important enough to further clutter an already very-cluttered description screen with, but if it were, it seems like it might be better to annotate the minority silent monsters rather than the majority of noisy ones?

[yesno]

they do? see, that's just my point though, i can't even remember.

i think it is important, but i do mostly play stealthy characters. i don't think the xv screen is very cluttered, and annotating the noisy monsters rather than the silent ones would emphasize to new players the role played by noise in crawl. just imo. ty for the response.

[duvessa]

i'm not sure this is important enough to further clutter an already very-cluttered description screen with, but if it were, it seems like it might be better to annotate the minority silent monsters rather than the majority of noisy ones?

It's certainly more important than the monster size or description.
Annotating the lack of a noise because noisy monsters are the majority would be bizarre, frankly. Depending on how you count, it's possible that the majority of monsters have negative energy resistance, but nobody suggests adding "It is not resistant to negative energy" to a rat's xv.

Note that different monster shouts make different amounts of noise - an ugly thing gurgle is louder than an orc shout, for example.

It might be better to make all monsters shout, and make all monster shouts the same volume. I suppose silent spectres would be an exception (also, remove silent spectres).

[ydeve]

Why make an exception for silent spectres? It's not like them shouting or not shouting makes any difference to gameplay.

[duvessa]

Because silent spectres are always silenced, so they can never shout.

[Sprucery]

Note that different monster shouts make different amounts of noise - an ugly thing gurgle is louder than an orc shout, for example.

Wow, can you tell me where in the source is the loudness of monster shouts?

[njvack]

mon-util.cc, get_shout_noise_level()

And then the monster definition in mon-data.h will have a shout_type.

Orcs make an S_SHOUT noise which falls through to a default noise level of 8; a ugly things S_GURGLE which is explicitly handled to return 10.

How much difference does the noise level make? Hissing is a 4 and rumbling is a 16; I can't tell if these are important differences or not. Sometimes hisses seem to wake things up, sometimes shouts don't; because I can't see the things that are awakened I don't know their effective wakeup radiuses. And that's not counting walls blocking sound. Ugh.

[Quazifuji]

I already thought noice was one of the game's more opaque mechanics and I didn't even know that shouts varied in volume. I'd always assumed that the different types of noises were just for flavor.

This definitely seems like something that needs to change to me, whether it's make the noise amounts uniform or making the messages more clearly convey that they're not.

[PleasingFungus]

It's certainly more important than the monster size or description.
Annotating the lack of a noise because noisy monsters are the majority would be bizarre, frankly. Depending on how you count, it's possible that the majority of monsters have negative energy resistance, but nobody suggests adding "It is not resistant to negative energy" to a rat's xv.

I'd agree wrt size, disagree wrt description, but yeah, I was wrong about annotating lack of noise. My post made more sense when I thought the number of monsters who were S_SILENT was much smaller, but checking shows it's something on the order of 40% of monster entries, so that's not *that* much of a difference...

tangentially, one of my favorite bits of crawl trivia: monsters 'trumpeting' or 'screaming' are both quieter than ugly things gurgling