Sound detection limits the boss's knowledge. Each action emits a noise event with an origin, intensity, radius, material, and lifetime. If perception succeeds, the boss records that event as a last-known position, investigates it, and commits there even when the player has already moved silently elsewhere.
From 0.52 s Tavi crosses a muffling rune mat below Kern's hearing threshold. At 1.36 s a sword impact on bare stone emits a visible sound event; Kern registers its origin at 1.50 s, while Tavi begins a quiet relocation.
Autoplay is disabled by reduced motion. Scrub across 0.52, 1.36, 1.50, 1.68, 2.58, 2.92, 3.32, 3.72, 4.28, and 5.12 seconds to inspect quiet output, emission, registration, investigation, source lock, attack, search expiry, counter, and reset.
Implement a deterministic noise-event pipeline, action and surface loudness, attenuation and occlusion, an observable hearing threshold, last-known rather than live position, investigation and search states, stale-information attacks, masking and distractions, multisensory feedback, accessibility assists, and a useful counter window after the boss resolves the wrong location.
Give footsteps, landings, rolls, weapons, collisions, voice, and interactables explicit base loudness. Multiply that value by movement speed, stance, equipment, and surface material, then publish an immutable event with origin, time, category, radius, and owner. Do not let audio mix volume decide gameplay detection: compression, user volume, and missing playback must not alter simulation. Visualize the event and threshold in debug builds.
Resolve range, attenuation, occlusion, masking, and faction rules once, then store a last-known point with confidence and expiry. Investigation targets that snapshot, not the player's live transform. Define whether a new stronger event replaces it, whether weak events widen uncertainty, and how search expands after arrival. Networked play must replicate the authoritative event and perception result rather than recomputing from client audio.
Expose a meter or material response before detection, show when the boss registers a sound, and distinguish investigating, source-locked, searching, and cleared states. Allow deliberate distractions only when their cost and ownership are clear. Mirror essential audio with rings, icons, haptics, captions, and optional threshold previews so hearing ability or device mix does not determine success.
A boss that turns with an unheard silent relocation invalidates the central rule. Freeze the perceived source when detection occurs, route all orientation and attacks through perception memory, and add assertions that the target does not change without a new eligible event. Visual prediction should match the exact point used by AI and collision.
If identical actions alternate between safe and detected because of hidden surface multipliers, animation events, or frame order, players cannot form a model. Make loudness tiers stable, signal special materials before commitment, apply attenuation consistently, and provide feedback at emission and registration rather than only after the punishment begins.
A gameplay noise event is data; the audible sound is one presentation of it. This separation keeps subtitles, accessibility, replay, deterministic tests, pause, and network authority coherent. Both should share category and timestamp, but changing a volume slider must never shrink the boss's hearing radius.
Store origin, age, confidence, source category, and propagation result. The state machine can investigate, search nearby cells, abandon stale evidence, or combine compatible events. A direct pointer to the player makes decoys impossible and encourages accidental omniscience whenever another system requests a target.
Soft cloth, shallow water, loose chains, breakable pottery, and ambient machinery can change the same action's effective loudness. Place them so at least one quiet route and one deliberate noisy shortcut are legible. Masking windows need visible or tactile equivalents and must affect both the rule and its feedback.
Measure detection latency, travel time, lock delay, attack duration, search expiry, and the player's silent relocation distance together. A distraction is useful only if its stale location stays committed long enough to create space. Later phases may remember longer or hear farther, but preserve a reliable way to clear or replace evidence.
Kern closes the rune set into its face and presses a stone hand to the ground. Bare rock carries Tavi's sword impact as widening teal rings, while old woven rune mats swallow footsteps. The elemental follows the vibration left in the quarry rather than seeing through walls.
Tavi uses ordinary movement and the existing sword. Quiet travel stays below the threshold, a deliberate sword impact publishes one strong source, and the safe route has enough time for full-body relocation before Kern commits. The counter begins only after the old evidence is visibly discarded.
Source tracking continuously turns an attack toward a known target until lock. Sound detection creates discrete evidence that may already be stale; the boss acts on the last event it successfully perceived. A sound can feed a tracking attack, but detection, memory, investigation, and lock remain separate states with separate failure cases.
The blind Janitor turns small noises into search targets. Creaking floorboards expose Six, while cloth-covered paths and louder environmental sounds change which actions he can detect. Because the encounter plays side-on, the readable contrast between quiet material and noisy objects turns hearing into a spatial route rule rather than an invisible AI statistic.
The blind Garrador responds to running, gunfire, hanging chains, and bells by charging the sound's location. Quiet crouched movement can leave that point without updating it, exposing the creature's back after the commitment. The fight makes a strong sound event both a liability and a deliberate lure, with the resulting attack geometry clearly tied to the heard source.
The End's sniper duel combines vision, camouflage, and hearing across several jungle spaces. Near his position, ordinary walking, crouching, or crawling can be heard, while Stalk movement and equipment that suppresses footsteps preserve a quiet approach. The example shows how noise belongs in a broader perception model and how stance can explicitly trade speed for information control.
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