UISoundController misc issues: unwanted initial button press sound, overlapping focus/press sounds, missing sounds

[hsandt]

This is a meta issue for various UISoundController-related issues that prevent me from getting the UI SFX I really want.

• Unwanted initial button focus sound
• Overlapping focus/press sound when clicking with mouse
• No SFX to move slider via directional input
• Inconsistent tab control focus

Unwanted initial button focus sound

button_focused SFX plays when the main menu appears, as the first button is focused. This is generally not wanted.

In addition, it plays even when the main menu gradually appears with transitions (title fade in), which makes it even weirder.

I have already coded a custom UI SFX manager for Unity and despite the differences with Godot, I remember I had the same issue, so I had to check manually if this was the initial selection or not (by checking some custom flag or current selectable reference). I think it's possible to do the same in Godot.

Overlapping focus/press sound when clicking with mouse

When clicking a button with the mouse, it focuses the button then presses it, causing double sound. I'm not sure how to fix this. The user may hold the button for a while before releasing, in which case playing two sounds makes sense, and there is no way to predict it.

In general I'm interested in a sound to select a button while navigating with directional arrows / D-pad, rather than actually focusing the button, but there doesn't seem to be a way to distinguish here. I don't remember I did any particular fix in Unity, so I probably have the same issue there, but I think I used a single Audio Source for all my UI SFX, which means that if user quickly presses and releases mouse button, the Press button SFX will take over the Focus/Select SFX.

No SFX to move slider via directional input

There is a sound to drag slider with the mouse (drag start and end) but not via keyboard/gamepad. I suppose this could be done via value change detection. However that means that dragging with mouse would also spam value change SFX (I reduced this effect by using sound throttling in Unity, so this could be done, but still ugly to play value change button when dragging with mouse...). Probably a lower level detection of directional input to change slider by step values may be better.

Inconsistent tab control focus

Controls tab doesn't autofocus the first element and even if it did, the big controls box doesn't have any focus SFX associated.

Audio and Video tabs autofocus the first element which could be a slider or toggle with their own focus sound.

This means that if I set Focus SFX for Tab Changed and slider/toggle, I will hear twice the SFX (I tested, the SFX seems played at louder volume).

Again, reusing the same source would in this case force SFX overwrite and thus play it only once.

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I'll add more issues when I think about them.

A few minutes later: added Inconsistent tab control focus

[Maaack]

Thanks for the detailed feedback!

When clicking a button with the mouse, it focuses the button then presses it, causing double sound.

This means that if I set Focus SFX for Tab Changed and slider/toggle, I will hear twice the SFX (I tested, the SFX seems played at louder volume).

That's a good suggestion for a single player for UI sounds. There might be some other options I'd want to explore first, like setting exclusion groups so only one SFX is playing at a time in each group. However, taken to the extreme, that effectively becomes one player for all UI sounds. Constantly swapping streams on one player might have a performance impact worth looking into first.

[hsandt]

Actually I was looking at this Metroidvania tutorial series video:

Build a Robust Audio System in Godot 4 (Music, UI, SFX)
https://youtu.be/PK-TDw3OAPw?list=PLfcCiyd_V9GFL_xF8ID9vIt5bs0NJI4EK&t=1589

and I've just learned about Godot's AudioStreamPlaybackPolyphonic. In other engines like Unity I would make my own class to handle sound throttling, giving a limit to the number of parallel sounds that may be played.

Maaack's Menu template just creates a new AudioStreamPlayer for each sound, so I think having one node for all UI sounds that uses AudioStreamPolyphonic instead may fix a number of issues, making it able to play a few overlapping sounds but not too many (by setting the correct parameters max_polyphony on the AudioStreamPlayer itself and polyphony on the AudioStreamPolyphonic resource for the max number of streams allowed. I haven't tried it yet so I'm not sure I understand it completely, and there should still be some work to fix logically duplicate SFX, though, but since you were mentioning performance impact, I thought it could be relevant.