How come the game's sound does not work when headphones are plugged in?

[Prudence Duodenum]

I like to stream my Steam games, and for the most part, the viewer is able to hear the game if 1: My headphones are plugged in, and 2: If my mic is muted. This game, however, produces no sound unless I'm unmuted and not using my headphones. Is there a way to make it work, or do some games just don't play sound under these circumstances no matter what?

[markymint]

That's going to be a system setting of some kind. The first thing you'd want to do in the Game's setup is check the Advanced area and select a different Digital Sound Driver. Usually people will want to switch it to "Hardware Mixer" or such. Then it should follow your hardware setup. Usually it will be set to Direct Sound which means DirectX kind of controls what's going on and not your hardware. DirectX could possibly instruct your PC to mute the headphones, heck knows why though. Plugging in headphones should not direct sound away, meaning, the game cannot take that kind of control over your hardware, maybe the engine (AGS) can but ultimately there should be a setting on your PC to prevent that from happening. May be as simple as checking your settings in the taskbar Speaker icon. Hope that helps, regards!

[Prudence Duodenum]

"Plugging in headphones should not direct sound away, meaning, the game cannot take that kind of control over your hardware, maybe the engine (AGS) can but ultimately there should be a setting on your PC to prevent that from happening."

That's strange, because when I play the Cat Lady or Downfall, the person watching the stream (via Discord) cannot hear those games if my headphones are plugged in, but when I play Lorelai, they can hear it fine. Thanks for the feedback. I'll have a look into it later!

[markymint]

Ok, so the issue is the setting under Sound for The Cat Lady & Downfall. Lorelai uses a different engine. It's probably set to DirectSound but if you switch it to another one like Hardware Mixer or WaveOut it should be fine. The setting there is conflicting with your audio settings for streaming.

Take a look at the manual sections 3.2 and 6.1 for more info.