Best/proper way to do UI sounds (hover/click)?

Godot Version

Godot v4.2.1 stable

Question

I am wondering what’s the most efficient way to apply sounds to UI elements like buttons for hover/select and click/press events?

I’d like to keep it flexible and easily maintainable.
Since I don’t want to go through every button to update their sounds if I ever want to change them, I had an autoloading AudioManager that would be called to
play sounds. Though, I still had to attach a script to every button that would hook up their signals to play said sounds.

Is there a different/better approach?

1 Like

Create a class that inherits Button with the sound functionality, name it something like SoundButton and create instances of that instead?

You can try using an Autoload and connecting to the SceneTree.node_added signal to connect to the different signals you want to play sounds.

This is an self-contained example:

extends Node


var playback:AudioStreamPlaybackPolyphonic


func _enter_tree() -> void:
	# Create an audio player
	var player = AudioStreamPlayer.new()
	add_child(player)

	# Create a polyphonic stream so we can play sounds directly from it
	var stream = AudioStreamPolyphonic.new()
	stream.polyphony = 32
	player.stream = stream
	player.play()
	# Get the polyphonic playback stream to play sounds
	playback = player.get_stream_playback()

	get_tree().node_added.connect(_on_node_added)


func _on_node_added(node:Node) -> void:
	if node is Button:
		# If the added node is a button we connect to its mouse_entered and pressed signals
		# and play a sound
		node.mouse_entered.connect(_play_hover)
		node.pressed.connect(_play_pressed)


func _play_hover() -> void:
	playback.play_stream(preload('res://beep_short.wav'), 0, 0, randf_range(0.9, 1.1))


func _play_pressed() -> void:
	playback.play_stream(preload('res://beep_long.wav'), 0, 0, randf_range(0.9, 1.1))

Feel free to create a scene with more advanced settings (exporting the audio sounds, creating different audio players,…)

You could use groups to differentiate buttons and play different sounds.

8 Likes

Thank you!
This worked best for my needs.

See also the workarounds described in this proposal: Add interaction sounds to BaseButton (customizable via theme) · Issue #1472 · godotengine/godot-proposals · GitHub

4 Likes

This is cool, thanks, mr!

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.