Skathari do not have a movement sound when wandering.

[N-Komaeda]

Brief description of the issue

Note: I have an explanation of what I think causes the issue below.
Skathari do not make noises while walking around. Once aggro'd, they do make noise.

What you expected to happen

When a Skathari is nearby, they should be making chittering noises, especially considering they're so dangerous.

What actually happened

They're silent, until aggro'd.

Steps to reproduce

Be near any Skathari-spawning PoI (Xenohive, for example), and listen. Do you hear that? Neither do we!

Additional info:

• Server Revision: master - 2023-08-15

2282a5ea607e8659632a648509d069188c35658d

• Anything else you may wish to add

Thanks to Evree, I started looking into this. Time for my findings (coming from a non-coder):
Skathari have no movement_sound like other simple_mobs do. Spiders, for example, have a movement_sound, that being 'sound/effects/spider_loop.ogg'. Every time spiders move a tile, they make this noise. This works, because the sound they make roughly overlaps with their movement speed. Every time they move, the new 'steps' set in, and in general it roughly matches itself.

Skathari do have a turn_sound, which is 'when they change direction' according to simple_mob.dm. Testing on a local, I've found this to not work on simple mobs when they move around. I assume this is because the movement_sound generally overrides the turn_sound, and the movement_sound for simple mobs is 'null' unless specified otherwise. I have been told by evree that they do make their chittering sound once aggro'd - I assume this is because they first switch direction before going to attack. When they are player controlled, they do make the chittering noise when switching direction, both when walking and when clicking around.

The 'simple' solution here would be to add a new sound not dissimilar to the spider walking sound (though lighter, maybe, as it has to be discernible) and make that the 'movement_sound'. I am unsure how this interacts with the 'turn_sound' flag, though, and that would require an actual coder to look into.

[Cerebulon]

The turning sound instead of 'movement_sound' was intentional because movement sounds are way too constant instead of the intended effect of "distant ominous chitter echos".

But yes, this is 100% a bug. Apparently the 'turn sound' only fires when the aggro AI package is active and not just, general wander-back-and-forth AI.

I don't really recommend shoving in an entire constant sound, given spider sounds already overlap themselves a hundred times, nor is the general 'constant ambient sound' that I believe mobs also support really suitable. Using turn_sound was meant to be a workaround to get occasional sounds without adding an entire special "check when last made sound" proc or some shit, but isn't working as intended.