Mouth calls.

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Elrique64
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Re: RE: Re: Mouth calls.

Post by Elrique64 »

Flinter wrote:I've always thought this would be a really cool mechanic in any game. Not to complicate things and I know this will almost certainly never happen but if certain animals responded to different calls. i.e. Mr. Aggressive buck responds to a longer, challenging grunt and Mr. Passive buck would flee or ignore that, but check out a short grunt
Spend some time out in the willow bottoms and river edges hunting Whitetails and you find this is not the case. Each deer has its own "voice" if you will. Most of the smaller and midsized boys in the neighborhood know the voices of the big boys. Kind of like how we humans know the sound of the voice of someone on the phone. Grunts (and to some extent bleat calls) rely on introducing a "new voice" to the environment. One that makes the other deer in the neighborhood come round to meet the new neighbor. Due to this, the bigger bucks usually have a much shorter duration to their grunts, EXCEPT when fighting or warning off other contending bucks. Everyone knows who they are, so there's no need for them to be loud, or a longer duration. (More to it than this, though. Most of the truly BIG boys don't like advertising their locations much. They don't speak a lot, and when they do it's time for everyone around them to listen.)

Bow hunting in the Missouri River bottoms of western ND, I always carried 2 or 3 different grunt calls with me. Each of them was a slightly different pitch. While rattling for bucks, I would alternate which grunt I was honking on, or would have a partner honking one as I honked the other. Rattling consisted of not only mashing, bashing and smashing the antlers together, but also thrashing tree branches and the ground, rocks or other things around me. And blasting on those grunt calls in a semi-realistic non-patterned pattern. (If that makes sense?) Make it sound like it's a fight for survival, because for a real pair of bucks it IS exactly that...

Surprisingly rattling for bucks does bring in a fair amount of does, too. The girls are wanting to see who the newest "big boy" is, so they have been known to shyly drop in for a peak or three. But they usually stick to the heaviest cover available as they sneak the peek.

IRL, unless the boys are fighting, over-calling is bad juju. But while they are sparring, getting ready to spar or fully engaged, the sounds they make are very similar to RL human wrestlers or boxers. (without the name calling.) I spent almost 20 minutes watching a couple of the reigning champs of the area fighting over a doe once. (While a much smaller buck was actually servicing her in the brush nearby, I might add.) The fighting they were doing was quite vocal, very noisy and could be heard for several hundred yards even through the thick brush of the willow bottoms. Missed calls during a rattle session or a RL buck fight, well... Can't be done.... BUT missed calls any other time CAN be done, and usually is if the call is going for more than about 3/4 to 1.5 seconds of duration. Think of a natural human burp. (or fart.) That's the usual duration of some of the big guys walking into a clearing to announce their presence.

My point with the start of this thread, it's all about making this aspect of the game more realistic. Animals have a switch now about normal, nervous, alerted and panic. Overcalling could change the state from normal mode to nervous after a few of them. Missed calls could do this as well, or go straight to alert. Varying the pitches and durations should also be options in calling, to add some individualism and to make things seem a bit more RL.

While this might not be easy to implement, some basic changes to the calling mechanics would go a long way to improving the realism of the game.
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