The button should disable audio when toggled on, since the audio being enabled is the default state. Having buttons be in a pressed state as the default unnecessarily draws attention to them.

It sounds like Unity's equivalent of this is also a "mute audio" button and not an "enable audio" button. Between that (i.e., standardizing) and the point you brought up about muted audio not being the default behavior, I agree that it'd make more sense for the button's pressed state to make the audio not play.

It also occurred to me that this should perhaps be made into either a project-level or editor-level setting, so that it is kept on closing and re-opening the editor. At present it always defaults to not muting, which I could see being annoying. I'll look more into how to save its state.

It also occurred to me that this should perhaps be made into either a project-level or editor-level setting, so that it is kept on closing and re-opening the editor. At present it always defaults to not muting, which I could see being annoying. I'll look more into how to save its state.

I'm not an expert in the norms for editor code but I believe this is a good use case for using project metadata. The editor can remember the toggled state of the mute button, across multiple tests of the game and multiple editor sessions, without the need for a project or editor setting that the user has to go menus to change.

• The current icon may be a bit confusing. It could be good to create a crossed-out version of the AudioStreamPlayer icon to indicate that sound is muted.

Here you go 🙂

mute_audio_icons.zip

MuteAudio2 is my favorite personally, but MuteAudio3 may look better at 16x16.

Thank you very much for the icons! 😄

Currently, I have it set up so that it displays the regular AudioStreamPlayer icon when not enabled to indicate that audio will play, and then switches to the muted icon when it is toggled on:

The icons themselves look great, but unfortunately the blue tint that Godot applies makes it a bit hard to read the red strikethrough, in my opinion... What are your thoughts?

IMO the strikethrough does not need to be red; it can be whatever the color of the surrounding icon is. The toggled style and difference in icon is already sufficient to distinguish the states.

I suppose we can see what others think as well, but I personally like the red "highlight" of the strikethrough - it draws my attention to the fact that this isn't an ordinary audio icon, that something is very different about its current state.

Perhaps Godot's icon support already has something like this, and/or perhaps it doesn't and it would be considered unnecessary or infeasible. But it would be neat if certain portions of an SVG could be marked as "don't recolor for the selected variation", so that in spots like these, the highlighted parts would retain their contrast against the rest of the icon.

There's currently a bug where, if the "mute audio" toggle is activated before the game is run, you can hear the game for a split second before the mute takes effect. I have a feeling this may have to do with the messaging system that it uses to send events to the game taking a frame to process, and if so I'm not entirely sure how this would be gotten around 😅

Following Calinou's suggestions in the contributor chat, I changed the way the button works to match the Skip Breakpoints button in the debugger. This looks a lot better to me!

The bright red strikethrough feels much more prominent, and indicates that the game is currently muted to me.

Thanks for reviewing and approving! 😄

it works as expected (including if you stop the project and run it again with game audio muted).

I'm glad this is working for you, but on my end when I run it with game audio muted, I can hear it for a split second. Is it completely silent for you the whole time?

Note that the option doesn't persist across editor restarts (only game restarts), which is good since it avoids accidentally forgetting about it and wondering why the game doesn't play any audio.

I agree that forgetting about it, then being confused why no audio is playing is a valid concern - I think that may have happened to me in the past with Unity, actually. Given that, perhaps it makes sense to leave the behavior that way for now, and consider possibilities for saving in a follow-up proposal/discussion. I could see there being cases, though, where someone may want to keep the setting off and not need to disable it every time they start the editor. Perhaps we could do something like have a toast notification appear on project startup warning the user that the mute setting is enabled?

Regarding how to save the setting (if at all), it looks like people have expressed their interest in several approaches:

• Don't save the setting at all, and always default to playing audio each time the editor is opened.
  • Pro: Users are less likely to forget that they pressed the mute button during a previous session and spend time trying to figure out why they're game is suddenly not producing any sound, since they have to explicitly re-enable the mute function each time.
  • Con: If a user knows they want to keep game audio muted while working across multiple sessions, they have to go back to the Game view and toggle the button on at the beginning of each session.
• Save the setting within project metadata (i.e., a per-project setting).
  • Pro: If a user is working on multiple projects at once, where some of them require audio but others don't, this prevents the user from having to change the setting every time they switch.
  • Con: Most users probably aren't working on multiple projects where the audio requirements are different(?).
• Save the setting within editor settings, and have it apply across all projects.
  • Pro: The setting doesn't need to be modified each time the opened project changes, if the user's circumstances are the same.
  • Con: If a user works on one project and disables audio there, then switches to a different project, they may be confused by the audio seemingly being gone.

Personally, at the moment I'm also leaning towards it being an editor-wide setting.

Forgetting about the mute setting and being confused as to why no audio is coming out is a very valid concern, IMO - I believe I've seen this happen to people in Unity multiple times (as I said earlier, I think I did it myself a few times too). As also previously proposed, if the game is started with "mute audio" enabled, we could have a toast notification pop up and remind the user about it. I could see this becoming annoying for users who have chosen to enable it, though.