6mo ago

it should be illegal for games to force unpausable audio before presenting a volume slider.

its fine ill just lose my hearing when launching your game while being unable to change the volume - forcing me to quickly alt tab, change program specific volume, and alt tab back before missing anything. latest example i put the game at 1% system volume and its still loud...

for reference, my entire system volume is set to 50% by default.

16 comments

Those games that make you play a section of the game before letting you access the options menu so i have to go find the config.ini so it knows what resolution to run at
I connected external volume control (an equiliser and a mixer) to my equipment so I can override anything that decides it knows better than I do what my hearing requirements are.
The current trend of games starting not with a main menu where I can dial in some settings like audio before it starts, and instead launch directly into a prologue or the game itself is infuriating
Like cool you made a super interesting in media res opener to your game, all action packed and shit. Too bad I'll spend half of it in the menu
I loathe how embedded web players no longer have built-in volume sliders. It's actually a better flow to rip the .mp3 to disk if I want to listen to a podcast without hurting myself. The real reason Steve Jobs didn't treat his cancer was because he knew the iOSification of everything would immortalize him through endless curses of his name
- Might not help, but if the podcast has an RSS feed you can really easily open it in VLC instead of having it blaring in a browser. On the playlists screen, there's a Podcasts section on the left side that you can add them to.
  
  I wish the VLC team was in charge of everything
spamming start after launching every Souls game because for some reason they only load profile settings after the start prompt even though every single console the games have been made for have had OS-level user profiles going all the way back to Demon's Souls so there's never been a reason not to read the save file at launch since it's user specific anyway
it's fine I'll just get my ass blown out by the first second of menu music until the end of time I guess thanks FromSoft
- My solution: Mute audio until after the start screen.
The borderlands game Tiny Tina's wonderland or w/e had this AND it wouldn't reset the sound to your preferences until the main menu loaded every time.
I remember nothing else about this game other than the permanent ear damage I suffered.
- GEARBOX
Also publisher splash screens should be required to be adjusted by the volume slider
- publisher splash screens shouldn't be
Wait, if the game volume is 1%, and the system volume is 50%, shouldn't the resulting volume be 0.5% of maximum? Do you have that amp setup from Back to the Future?
Sorry, I'm joking. To be more helpful, this reminds me an old problem PulseAudio introduced (and then disabled) on Linux some years ago, it was a feature called "flat volumes". The idea was to avoid the need to have two volume adjustments (if only one application used the sound card), one a per-application one (done in software) and then another from the sound card, which is wasteful and can result in lowered audio quality if one is set very low. So they got rid of the per-application volume in the case that only one application was playing audio.
But the result would be that, if an application (like a game) changed it's volume (by setting the application volume), it would in effect set the hardware volume, resulting in this kind of sudden loud noises even if you previously had your system volume set all the way down.
Maybe on your system it works similar to this "flat volumes" feature and maybe that can be disabled somehow?
Games should default to 0% volume with Russian subtitles
SEGAAAAA
I just leave my headset off when I start a game for the first time now.
Pictured, me:

16 comments