Sounds Play Only When Starting in a Certain Scene

I’ve encountered an issue in my game where certain sounds in scene A only play if I start the game in scene A. If I start the game in scene B, then switch to scene A, most sounds play properly, but certain ones don’t.

Please see the linked .blend file: [link removed now that problem is solved]

Basically, I have a start screen (scene “Start”) that leads to a loading screen (scene “Loading”), and that leads to the game itself (scene “Main”).

I’ll explain how to recreate the issue, but first here are the game controls:

WASD: walk forward/back, strafe left/right
Mouse Move: look around/steer
Hold left shift while walking to run

To see exactly what I’m talking about, select scene “Main” and hit p. When the game starts, follow the onscreen prompt and hit enter. Once you find yourself in the dungeon walk forward until you reach a table with a bowl on it and some chains overhead. Go left around the table and follow the opposite wall to the left until you enter a passageway leading to a room with a coffin. As you approach, the coffin will open. At this point, there’s supposed to be a grinding stone sound, but there’s nothing. The background music plays, but nothing else.

If you quit the game and select scene “Main” and hit p from there, follow the exact same steps and this time the grinding stone sound will play as the coffin opens.

This is the easiest instance to recreate, but several sounds are doing this.

Why does this happen? Why some sounds and not others? Most importantly, how can I fix it?

It might be relevant that all the missing sounds are using the 3D Sound feature. They were also all added to the file at about the same time, so maybe when I was adding this particular batch of audio files and hooking up actuators, I messed up some setting. I can’t figure out what that might be, though. Also, I don’t know if it makes a difference, but I’m using version 2.75.

I figured it out.

It was related to 3D sound. In the scene settings, under the Audio section, you have to change the Distance Model to linear clamped to make 3D sound work. I had done this in scene “Main”, thinking that since that’s the scene where the sound plays, that’s the only place I needed to change it.

However, it seems that whichever scene you start it (in this case, scene “Start”) forces some of its settings on any scenes you load afterward. The solution was to change the distance model in scene “Start” to linear clamped as well.

It does raise the question of why we have separate settings for each scene if only one scene actually controls everything…