Shattered Kingdoms

From what I hear, they can smell you from a room away regardless.

There are two types of sound flags for an item. One for relatively quiet items that only can be heard in the same room and one for louder items that can be heard from a room away. Whatever item you are talking about must only be flagged with the first, not the second. And the sound functionality is SOUND not smell. Using it for smells distorts the functionality, which includes not being able to hear the sound when you are deafened. So a builder messed up.

A lot of the items that are flagged with echoes like this aren't used just for sound. Like that one that causes small flowers to grow all around when someone walks close. Or, I guess, in-room now.

I won't force them to be fixed, but they ought to be. There shouldn't be any confusion on the builder's part, since they have always used the commands "sound_near" and "sound_distance" to set the strings.

I'd just make one onmove event that returned an echo after evaluating successful conditionals... and add a velocity integer to the event to define how many exits it will propogate through and a 5+ bit sensory flag to toggle whether or not certain senses (you could easily include spirit sight, detects, etc) would be evaluated in the aforementioned conditionals to get the message. Then builders could just edit the event with a chmod-like way to customize how it was perceived by characters instead of having to build separate functions for sounds, smells, and so on and so on. Nice and DRY.

walked right into that one.

I only brought up "smell" because of the perfume you can buy in Teron. The first cool room echo item one of my characters ever owned.