Dev Archipelago sheep's repel sound is audible from too far away

[wjt]

Threadbare version

v0.2.2-29-g682357b48

Affected scene

res://scenes/dev/dev_archipelago.tscn

Description

In Dev Archipelago there are a pair of sheep playing tennis:

They each have a PlayerRepel component. This component plays a sound effect whenever the repel action fires.

The problem is that the sound effect can be heard from a long way away. For example, you can hear it from here:

and here:

This feels too far away for the sound to be audible.

XP Summary (total 500)

Subdomain	Skill	XP
Art: Music & Sound	Problem Solving	150
Art: Music & Sound	Creativity & Design Thinking	75
Art: Music & Sound	Technical Literacy	75
Game Design: Game Feel & UX	Problem Solving	75
Game Design: Game Feel & UX	Creativity & Design Thinking	50
Game Design: Game Feel & UX	Technical Literacy	75

[wjt]

The AudioStreamPlayer2D has the default max distance (2000px) and attenuation curve (1.0, i.e. linear). In this scene we do not have an AudioStreamListener2D so attenuation & stereo panning is relative to the middle of the viewport.

So you might think: OK, reduce the distance to 1280px (say). This means that you can still hear the sound effect even when the sheep are offscreen by up to half a horizontal viewport, but beyond that they are silent. The problem with this is that this attenuation also applies to the player's repel component: if the player is on the left-hand side of the screen, that's 640px from the centre, so the sound effect would be half-way down the attenuation curve. (This is already the case of course - if you repel near the edge of the ink levels the sound is slightly quieter. It's just not very noticeable because the max distance is 2000px so you're never more than about 1/3 away from the centre of the screen.)

In a couple of scenes an AudioStreamListener2D is added: the music puzzle has one as a child of the player (i.e. the player's ears are our ears) and Sueños Nocturnos has one in one scene as a child of the Camera2D (itself a child of the Player).