Speech And Speaking Distance

[PratzStrike]

Has any thought been given to how far speech tends to travel? On a quiet day you can hear someone speaking at a good distance, and the speech distance in H&H seems a little short. Even if you can't understand what they're saying, you can still hear them saying -something-. My thought was to extend the distance speech can be 'heard' ingame clearly, then add about, what is it, half that as a 'You hear (name if you know them/'someone' if you don't) speaking.', maybe with a tiny speech bubble popping up like the party guide arrow showing which way it came from.

EDIT: Sorry! I forgot the other half of this - it would necessitate a Whispering command of some sort so that you could talk more quietly with people nearby.

[kaka]

I'd like something along the lines of this.
I've thought about distorting speech based on distance, but - while somewhat cool - it could quite possibly also be very annoying.

[PratzStrike]

Oh, I bet the coding for actual aural interference would be a nightmare - EVERYTHING makes noise, and soundwaves bounce back and forth off things, and noise travels and meshes together after a point - so what I was originally suggesting was simpler - two contracentric circles, the big one being the current range+added range+maybe 25% or 50% extra where you can hear words but not what they're saying, and then the circle inside that for the actual speech to show up in your chat.

[Darkren]

For the sake of flavor, that wouldn't be too terrible of an idea. Kinda sucks if you want to have a conversation in area chat with people that are, for any reason, slightly out of your range yet still in sight. Party/Village/Private chat could solve most everything else, as inconveniencing as it might be to have to initiate, versus just being able to start talking.

[Danno]

I like it. It's annoying when I can't tell if I'm outside of someone's hearing range or not. At least they'd be able to hear my muffled speech with this, then they could let me know they don't know what I'm saying and that we need to be closer. If there's whispering, maybe there could also be a "shouting" option - it could take 1 stamina for every 20 characters entered (and still 1 stamina if it's less than that). The shout would be heard farther, of course. Maybe it could even startle animals (scare those nasty boars away if you shout at them from behind?) and have other effects.