More clues to what is happening outside

[Horst]

Once you are inside a house, you only get a clue of the weather outside by the windnoise, and if it might be foggy by the "???" on the daylight counter. It would be really nice to have a bit more information about what goes on outside, especially in terms of wildlife. I hate stepping out of the door and suddenly finding myself next to a wolf or bear, especially if I had been chased into the house, and would like to know if the threat is gone.
After all it is a house - with windows, and if looking out of them is technically impossible it would be very nice to at least hear the bear noises or occassional wolf barking and howling inside as well...

[Wastelander]

I can see the appeal, but regular blizzards, snowfalls and frost, combined with the relative warmth of a house cause humidity to form on the outside of windows which then freezes over and messes with visibility. I don't have any sources for that and, to be honest, I just made that up but it does seem like a plausible in-game explanation.

In-enginge, however, structures are separated from the game map as evidenced by a loading screen upon entering, so while you're in the house the game-map would have to stay in memory which would take away from playability on lower-end computers which is one of the many things this game does right.

[Horst]

So what happens to the wolf after he chased me to the door? If any calculation of the map stops once you are inside, he would always have to be at the spot where he was when you entered or at some point have despawned completely. I'm not under the impression this is the case, but if you are right, the game would just have to know animal in radius X, will despawn in Y hours -> that is a very small amount of information just for deciding if audio is played, and for how long.

For the normal spawn I would asume, as the game knows time of day as well as the weather, it could predict if wildlife would spawn outside once you leave the house, and also play a sound or something similar without loading the entire map. Or (as I am uncertain how the spawning works) if the animals have set routes where they are at a given time of the day if there is no blizzard, all you would need is a schedule for each house telling when wildlife would be spawned near it and just play sound accordingly...

But I am no programmer, so maybe in my mind this seems all a bit too easy.