The first sound played by a sim can be soft and/or shortened

[jbphet]

A few years ago all of the major browsers implemented an "autoplay" policy that prevents web pages from making any sounds until the user interacts with the page. This prevents sites from making sounds as soon as users land on the site, which was happening a lot for a while. In some of the implementations, such as in Chrome, the audio context won't allow anything to happen, even volume changes for gain nodes. Thus, a situation can arise where a bunch of volume changes and the playing of a sound are all kicked off by the first thing a user touches on a sim. This can result in the very first sound being cut off, or sounding soft, or both.

We've basically just decided to live with this for now, so I'll mark the issue as deferred. However, if we ever decided it was a big enough problem that we should address it, we could add some code to make the initial volume changes really quick, and to also delay the first playing of a sound until these were all done. It doesn't seem worth the cost in terms of code complexity for the relatively minor benefit, but it could be done.

Here are some related issues:

• Add activation of audio context on user events if suspended #9
• Firefox to implement auto-blocking of audio, we should test and make sure we handle it #58
• First sound slightly softer gravity-force-lab#252
• Investigate simplifying the code to resume the audio context #68
• Sound initialization problem with initialScreen query parameter #137