Wildlife detection ignores vertical distance

[Klobberthon]

Noticed this twice now. 

First time I was way up on a cliff looking down in PV (seemingly too far to be detected).  There was a bear at the bottom of the cliff almost directly below me.  You can imagine my surprise when I see him rear up on two legs and then begin charging around the nearest footpath up the mountain!

Second time was just now.  I was up on the Lake Overlook area in ML.  I was again looking down a cliff and noticed 2 wolves that were acting strangely.  They weren't patrolling.  Instead they seemed like they were on a direct path that took them right past the camp office.  I thought nothing of it and continued looking around for sticks.  I had no smell.  Well, after a few minutes I hear footsteps coming up the hill right towards me.  I crouch and begin backing off but it's too late.  The wolf crests the hill and charges.

This is on Interloper but I had a heavy hammer and was rested so I beat him off without much damage.  I then heard his buddy begin his charge.  I took off running and barely made it to the rope leading down.  The climbing animation saved me from the second wolf.  

Now I know it is possible that these wolves were just patrolling and maybe heard me when they got close enough.  But I hadn't seen wolves around there before and something tells me the 2 wolves were the same ones I saw making a bee-line for the exact path I had taken up the hill.  My theory is that they smelled/heard me from the bottom of the cliff as I was looking over it and they went into "investigation" mode.

So... be careful when looking down cliffs lol

[Hotzn]

To be honest, I don't think you even have to look OVER the cliff to be detected. I was attacked once on the trail on the back of the dam, leading down to the frozen river. It was practically impossible that the wolf could have seen me up there. Still, it came running up the trail in attack mode (and it had barked down on the river before that). My presumption was that either there was a terrain glitch and the wolf must have seen me THROUGH the terrain. Or that somehow vertical distance did not matter for detection.

[Semmel]

I have not experienced the vertical distance bug but being a programmer, I can easily see this happening. And the fix is obvious, too. If the developers notice that as a bug, it should be fixed relatively easily.

In my experience (mostly interloper), there is no detection blocking from objects. Maybe there is but I have the feeling that wolfs detect the player purely on distance, not in actual line of sight. I have no prove of that, but thats my working assumption when entering wolf areas and I cant remember a situation disproving that hypothesis.

Again, in my experience mostly on interloper, the wind direction has no influence on the smell distance. When approaching wolfs with wind from wolf to me, the wolf will still smell me if I have meat on me. (I almost always have my wolf tax meet with me). Again, I have no prove to the contrary of that hypothesis and I might be wrong. Programming wise, it would be simple to implement wind dependency for smell. If x is the vector between wolf and me, then the square distance is the scalar product, meaning x^T*x. The wind direction could be implemented as an ellipse in 3d, described by a 3x3 matrix A, but shifted so that the player is at the tip of the long axis. The distance to the wolf would be changed to (x-e)^T*A*(x-e) where e is the first eigenvector of the matrix A which gives the vector of the long axis. The matrix A would depend on the wind condition. A and  e only have to be computed once per wind condition. This would not influence the performance of the game.