• he/him

🇨🇦 Aspiring game designer/programmer/musician. Speedrunner and pianist. Privacy advocate. Feminist. Trans rights. 8‐time February 29th survivor. Wario. My brain’s probably worth a lot of money!


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bekoha
@bekoha

Been daily driving wireless Bluetooth earbuds on PC for more than half a year now, and as they're often turned off or in the charging case, it's always fun to see just how many games, including recent releases, are incapable of automatically handling a situation where there's no audio device in the system and refuse to launch in the first place, instantly close after loading or crash with a made up error, usually blaming something on the graphical side instead of the actual reason. Extra points if the game is able to run properly if you explicitly provide a -nosound or something similar as an argument but would refuse to launch otherwise.


GFD
@GFD

in this vein, i use USB headphones that shut off if i take them off and fold them up when i leave my computer for a minute, and a ton of games (and plenty of other software with sound, frankly) will not handle the sound output forcibly changing gracefully, and will usually either stop having sound until you restart them or just crash. (Minecraft used to be an especially bad offender for me before more recent versions fixed this. it was particularly painful because of the long play sessions and ridiculously long load times with big Forge modpacks.)

i believe this is rarely anticipated because most people are just using the audio plugs on their PC, and that output device never disappears because the sound card doesn’t leave the PC when you unplug a 3.5 ⁠mm jack. incidentally, “audio device hotplug support” is the field i most want added to PCGamingWiki.


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in reply to @bekoha's post:

Luckily somehow I managed to avoid games with this behaviour, generally if I put my earbuds away games still continue to run, just that the vast majority won't auto-pickup the device again without either an explicit audio system restart where possible or a full game restart

Games can cope with controllers disconnecting, why not sound devices?

That's a high bar brother, immediately remembered a multi-day meltdown one developer had a couple of months ago because his game failed a Steam lotcheck (I think?) because the reviewer caught it crashing from a disconnected controller and that dev sincerely said something along the lines of "my game works perfectly fine and without bugs and it's the user that's at fault for doing unexpected things with the controller"