Use the Dummy audio driver in the project manager - #38208

I'm not sure it's worth hacking it this way. If Godot uses too much CPU due to the coreaudio driver, working it around only in the project manager doesn't help much as 99% of user time is spent in the editor itself.

And if we ever decide to add sound features to the project manager (e.g. for accessibility), it might lead to some wasted hours trying to figure out why it's not outputting any audio.

And if we ever decide to add sound features to the project manager (e.g. for accessibility), it might lead to some wasted hours trying to figure out why it's not outputting any audio.

If we add screen reader support, I think the application emitting sound would be the screen reader, not Godot.

If we add screen reader support, I think the application emitting sound would be the screen reader, not Godot.

That depends on how it's implemented. I've done a bit of work to help out the developer of this screen reader editor plugin, and while I don't think it works in the project manager, using the dummy audio driver would completely prevent any future in-process accessibility tools from working

Rebased and tested again, it works successfully 🙂

That depends on how it's implemented. I've done a bit of work to help out the developer of this screen reader editor plugin, and while I don't think it works in the project manager, using the dummy audio driver would completely prevent any future in-process accessibility tools from working

The project manager doesn't support plugins yet, so I think this PR would be fine to merge for now. Also, if project manager plugins ever become supported, I guess we could have a way to initialize the audio driver only when a sound is actually played for the first time. (This would be opt-in for games because this adds significant latency to the first sound.)

This could potentially be superceded by a 4.x version of #63458 . The ability to mute until audio output in the PR means that it would also work with screen reading software.

Discussed in the PR review meeting. Reduz suggests that more research is needed to solve #38154. #63458 may be an appropriate solution, but even it may be overkill.

Rebased and tested again, it works as expected.

Note that TTS audio output is not emitted by Godot itself (but by the OS instead), so this doesn't affect potential screen-reader support in the future.

Thanks!