Problems with the Volume Controls

Author: Zoleda Davila

Posted On: 1/26/2024

The game was experiencing issues trying to control the volume of the backgorund music and sound effects that were in the game, as  well as, saving their volume settings once they exited and went back into the game.  In order to control the volume, I set up two slider controls in the Settings Menu widget that controls the Sound Classes for the background music and the sound effects. The team members that were testing this feature were growing frustrated as the music kept blasting their ears after repeatedly using the sliders in the Settings Menu. 

After looking over the blueprints and some debugging, I found that even though I called the the values for the volume from the Save Game blueprint when I construct the Settings Menu Widget, I did not reset the values to the new ones when the slider was used. So, using the volume sliders did nothing, because every time the Settings Menu was created , the values on the sliders would stay the way they were in the beginning and the volume would go up again. 

In order to solve this problem, I made sure to set the values of the Save Game blueprint to the new values from the sliders. Through debugging, I was able to confirm that the values were the same as when they were changed the previoius time. Once completed, the other members on the team started to test it again and were relieved when it worked after several trials. In addition to this solution, I cerated a safe guard in case the Save Game blueprint was not found:. In case there was no Save Game, I would immediately create one when the player entered the Settings Menu with default values of 0.5, so the user is not shocked by the music. However, this may not stay when we advance further in the game and start adding more options to the Settings Menu.