I can mental map! (again this is a completely different game at this point)
but because I'm never exactly sure what angle I am facing, it makes it really hard to walk around the rocks. If everything was square, I could do things like sidestep with A or D and maintain my orientation.
I am now imagining a roguelike where you are on a square tile, and can remember how many steps you moved in a straight line till you bump against a wall, and you can build a spacial picture in your head of where you've been.
My blind friend is better at navigating and directions than his wife who is sighted. Anywhere in town he can walk and know where he is. In a car, he has a mental map of which roads connect to which where. If you are moving around in a 3D space you need enough landmarks to build a mental map. (You do have some - the rocks that work with the sonar)
Ah yes, the point about a mental map is very important, i didn’t consider this. I just thought, but a few small obstacles in the way, so it’s not too hard to run past it. But paradoxically doing that i probably made it harder, since all of these are very insignificant and “look” the same. It’s probably a good idea, to have at least 1 big landmark, which is very different from the rest, so you can gain a sense of orientation based on that.
The point with the sidestep i don’t quite get, you can do this also when the obstacle is round? In fact, that is what i’m doing as well, just side stepping it when i found it. I mean the important thing would be, that it’s uniform right?
Btw, also one of my first ideas was to do something based on step count, sound very logical.
Mastergammler might referring to a different type of game if it was grid based. Then strafing left or right one "Unit" would be helping if obstacles and walls took up one zone. Then you are sort of playing minesweeper with sound. Right now, the player does not know how much forward, sideward or turning amounts they do. So it's difficult to build a mental map when we don't know the units. You can try to count footsteps but I bet that takes a ton of practice.
Maybe if your left/right sounds added a hum to them instead. Then you might have a constant source to tell you if you are an obstacle or not. Then you could use sonar for longer distances while the humming sonar would be more for obstacle avoidance.
Well yes, the counting of footsteps was another game idea, this wouldn’t work here, because the footsteps sounds are not consistent with distance. A major challenge i found is, that evaluating distances with audio only is incredibly hard, just due to the nature of how sound is scaling, because it is not linear. The volume ramps up when something is really close and then fades slowly. So i don’t think a mental map based on specific unit works. But what i do think is, that you still need the ability to give relative information to a player. Like, there is a big rock to the right of the enemy etc. which is also a way to build a mental map, just relative.
And it is in fact possible to know how much you turn, or how much you strafe etc. If you’re in front of an obstacle the ping will be dead center. Once you walk sideways it will gradually move to the right or left side. That way you can gauge how far you have walked, relative to that obstacle. And now you can try to walk forward an see if you are already past the obstacle (because the size of the thing is another challenge to communicate) and will get an directional bump sound if you hit it. And that sound then tells you how much more you need to walk to the side. If the bump is still in front, it means you need to walk way more sideways, if its to the sides, it means you’re almost past it. Thats btw a good reason for the obstacles beeing circular, because this allows for this gradual directional response.
And the degree of turning btw works the same. You can center yourself towards an obstacle ping. And now you can turn gradually, untily the ping appears completely to one side. Now you know, that you turned 90 degrees, relative to that obstacle.
Btw, that idea with an additional kind of proximity sensor also crossed my mind, but dunno if that gets to crowded too fast. Plus, the enemy actually has a hum, that you can better locate him when close.