Board Game Arena

I’ve been playing on an iPad Pro for a while, and I cannot get any sound in any of my games. I’ve enabled all of the sound options in settings, it’s enabled on my device, but both games I’ve tried (Azul and Wingspan) have no sound at all. I think one of them gave me sound during the tutorial, but I’ve never had it during a game. When I open up the master volume control from the main page and move the slider around, it sometimes plays the sound effect indicating I’ve changed the slider. But otherwise, nothing. Does this happen to anyone else, or is this a known issue?

I’m a bit new to BGA, but are the developers just not active? That bug has been open for 3 years.

There are certainly active developers on BGA, but there is only a limited amount of effort that goes into bug fixing. Fixing a bug isn't just a case of, oh, I'll switch that from A to B and bang. Sometimes you have to spend time investigating (anywhere from a few minutes to basically as long as you want to put in). Some bugs are hard to reproduce. Some bugs require particular hardware or software (this is one of those cases, so basically any dev who doesn't have an iOS device probably won't be able to help). Some are hard to fix even when you know what the issue is.

Add to that that I believe most devs are volunteers, that there's something like 100k of bugs in the system (that's all bugs, including fixed ones, but still means there's a lot of bugs), some devs probably only work on specific games and don't work on the website in general, and some devs would be working on implementing new games and probably not so much on bug fixes except those encountered in the implementation of those games - there's a lot of reasons why a bug could be sitting open for 3 years. Non-active developers is not the issue. There's just lots of competing priorities and factors limiting what effort can go into bug fixing.

(speaking as someone who doesn't do dev for BGA, but is a software dev in real life, and greatly appreciates those who volunteer their time for the site)

metaprogram wrote: ↑21 September 2023, 06:49 I’m a bit new to BGA, but are the developers just not active? That bug has been open for 3 years.

As far as I understand it:

it has been stated many times on this site (and even on that bug report by BGA staff), Apple does things their own way and doesn't follow general Web standards in many instances, and they refuse to allow non-Safari browser interfaces, so most of these iOS "bugs" seem to be related to Apple's very closed ecosystem, and many are impossible to fix without Apple themselves making changes, or are EXTREMELY difficult to fix, and Apple may just change things on their end again re-breaking them, so even if it is potentially fixable, it's often not worth BGA programers' time to possibly put months into a fix, that may not work by the time they actually fix it when Apple just changes something again.

Sorry for the run-on sentence, but hope that makes sense.

TLDR: Apple's fault.

But why does sound work when doing replays? I haven’t tried tutorials but op says it works for that too. It also works when grabbing chips in splendor. So certain scenarios it works.

Remkar wrote: ↑21 September 2023, 14:17

metaprogram wrote: ↑21 September 2023, 06:49 I’m a bit new to BGA, but are the developers just not active? That bug has been open for 3 years.

As far as I understand it:

it has been stated many times on this site (and even on that bug report by BGA staff), Apple does things their own way and doesn't follow general Web standards in many instances, and they refuse to allow non-Safari browser interfaces, so most of these iOS "bugs" seem to be related to Apple's very closed ecosystem, and many are impossible to fix without Apple themselves making changes, or are EXTREMELY difficult to fix, and Apple may just change things on their end again re-breaking them, so even if it is potentially fixable, it's often not worth BGA programers' time to possibly put months into a fix, that may not work by the time they actually fix it when Apple just changes something again.

Sorry for the run-on sentence, but hope that makes sense.

TLDR: Apple's fault.

This may not be entirely accurate. I agree that it is apparently BGA's party line that it is Apple's fault:

2021-03-27 9:20 • Een • Bug has not been reproduced by developers yet:
Issue on this is on the iPad. Unfortunately, websites don't have the possibility to play sounds on Apple iPad/iPhone. Pressure on this should be put on Apple, not on web developers.

Leaving this report open so that people can see this information, and maybe get together to petition Apple. Who knows what can happen.

But according to this it isn't:

2023-08-17 2:38 • muddypawprints • Bug has not been reproduced by developers yet:
Een - I actually discussed this with an Apple developer. There is not a problem on Apple's end. It is a security measure. It is how the code is written. If you look at Splendor on this site, there IS sound. Ios needs the code to respond to the user either scrolling or clicking. Once that is done, sound will be played. Hence, there is sound when we click to take chips in Splendor. It would be nice if BGA could work WITH Apple instead of telling us that we need to petition them to change their operating system. What is BGA doing to fix this for your paying customers?

This is in the bug report linked to above. The question is did sound use to mostly work on iOS devices. If so, then the answer may be "it's mostly Apple's fault and in order to fix this we would have to revamp our entire framework, and that's not going to happen."

^^another comment there suggests they do exactly that to fix it:
https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewto ... 70&lang=en

It doesn't anymore, but for some time previously chrome console used to have security warnings about playing animations before user interaction. It would occur on the dojo animation.play() during the setup().

Thanks for some of the extra context and explanation.

It's kind of hard to buy the argument that it's apple's fault considering that thousands of other websites play sound just fine on my ipad.

Another reason it's difficult to buy the argument is that occasionally I actually do hear sound. Like when I adjust the volume slider from outside of a game, I occasionally (rarely) hear the "click" sound that happens to indicate that the new volume slider position is locked in. I also have heard sound during tutorials.