So, while I can’t seem to find the references at the moment, I seem to recall reading quite some time ago that there were no guarantees when it came to adjusting the volume of a sound once that sound was playing. It might work, and it might not.
On my own machines, I’ve never had a problem with doing so, as far as I recall.
But of course, I haven’t tested on a great variety of machines… (And don’t currently have access to a great variety of machines on which to test.)
So, let me ask: Is this still true? Might some machines simply leave a sound at its initial volume? And how likely is such an issue to occur…?
You see, I have a number of situations in which I’m relying on being able to adjust sound-volumes on-the-fly: fading music -in and -out at arbitrary points; adjusting sounds to match player progress in a puzzle; having certain sounds increase in volume as an ability is charged; etc.
As such, I’m a little worried that these features might simply… not work for some players… :/
Hmm. IM assuming this problem primarily persists on old hardware. I own (and have owned) many old machines dating pre 2010 and haven’t really experienced any problems like this but I haven’t done in depth tests with games with varying audio levels as I never tried to use them to play games. I do however know that old sound cards in these computers are not very powerful and sometimes bug out when they have too high quality sound playing or many playing at the same time (from some experience), but you really need to push it to experience this. Probably has something to do with the card not having enough processing power to compute and output all those sound buffers. However if you are targeting old computers that still use Windows-XP or some other old operating system, I don’t have a clue if this problem appears on these types of computers, as my old machines use some modernish versions of Linux which may come with better drivers that can handle audio processing better.
On modern computers however, I don’t remember to have ever come across this issue. I do believe this “problem” is primarily linked to old hardware or/and buggy drivers. This kind of gives you two answers to your question. If you are targeting old hardware then you might come across a system that doesn’t support on the fly volume level changes so it would be unreliable. If you are targeting more modernish hardware I doubt that there would be a system out there that comes across this issue with up to date drivers.
