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[ParaSait]

So I was reading some posts and thinking a little bit about what huge difference it really makes in gameplay for people with sound in comparison to those without.
Sound has become a near essential part of the gameplay, and people who have no sound for some reason (no sound installation, or a broken sound card, a guarding boss, or hey, maybe even actually deaf?) have a huge disadvantage, and it's just plain unfair.

I think there should be a "deaf mode" of some kind. For starters it would make sense, since we already have blind mode. In fact, I think it actually makes more sense, since it's much more likely for people without sound to play DoomRL, than for people without vision.
I propose it should be implemented so that (important) sound effects and their rough direction are described in the message area. For example: "You hear a demon to the northwest", or something like that.
Negative side of it would be that it could cause a lot of enter pressing, which could get annoying.

Any opinions/suggestions?

[AStranger]

Deaf mode sounds like a good idea to me. I noticed there seems to be a single column on both sides of the screen that aren't used. What if those columns flashed colors depending on the noise that would have been heard? Different colors for different mobs, flashing to one side indicates direction, or even have the both sides flash when the mob is in close proximity. Independent of direction, the length of time the flash lasted could indicate 'volume'. Possibly have each flash last different lengths of time to indicate which side.

Using the absolute leftmost/rightmost columns may not be a good idea, but I kinda like the flashing colors somewhere because it'd cut down on the message spam, and since you can't replay noise it's not fair to have a history of it otherwise.

[Silhar]

We could have a "(L)isten key", which would send us to another screen, the one listing out what our DoomRLGuy's hearing at the moment (or what sounds were played since the last turn). That would let ones with hearing problems avoid lots and lots of enter-punching. Might even be useful for regular players.

[thelaptop]

I like the use of the sides, though the "flashing" concept probably needs some fine tuning since we need to "see" the overlay of multiple sounds all at once.  For people who play full screen, it will be quite painful to find out just what was heard, particularly if the flashing is too fast.

Actually, when Kornel rewrites the sound engine to have more spatial locality, we might even want to make the sound as a "flashing ring" around Doomguy outside of his vision, "stacking the sounds".

Here's an example, assuming that Doomguy has a vision of 2 tiles (' ' marks what can be seen, '.' represents hidden).  It should be visible for at least twice as long as the longest sound made.  The closer the creature near the edge of the vision, the closer it is, and anything else that is further from that "stacks" away from it, spoking out.

...............
...............
....... .......
......   ......
...VV  @  hh...
.....B   ......
....B.. .......
...............
...............

Not sure what kind of colour scheme to use though.