You play some Delta Force. Every order you give gets confirmed by a voice with a military radio filter: narrow, a little rough, like talking into a walkie-talkie. You quit, go back to the game selector and pick Elite Dangerous.
You ask for the landing gear and your ship answers you. Through the same military radio.
In Elite Dangerous that voice should sound like a ship's cockpit, cleaner and with more echo. But when you were switching games in EchoControl, the new game kept the sound of the old one.
The bug: only what the new game asked for got changed
Every game comes with its own settings for how the spoken reply sounds: the radio effect, the type of echo, the voice, the listening mode. Delta Force asks for the field radio. Elite Dangerous doesn't ask for anything there, because the cockpit sound is what the app uses when nobody says otherwise.
When a game loaded, the app applied only the settings that game had written down. Everything else stayed as it was. If you started straight into Elite Dangerous, all good. But if you came from Delta Force, "as it was" wasn't the default anymore. It was the military radio.
A game that says nothing shouldn't repeat what the last game said.
The fix: a clean start on every load
Today, every time you load a game, the app does two things, in this order:
- It puts all of those settings back to their default values.
- It applies what that game asks for on top. Only its own.
It doesn't matter which game you come from. Elite Dangerous sounds like Elite Dangerous even after Delta Force, and the other way around.
There was another way to cover this: make every game write down all of its settings, even the ones that match the default. We didn't pick it. It fixes this case, but every new setting would have to be typed by hand into all five games, and the first time someone forgets, the same hole opens again.
One of the tests we added does exactly the scene at the top of this post: it loads Delta Force, then Elite Dangerous, and checks that the echo is back to the cockpit sound. It's been in the app since version 1.0.
What still doesn't let us relax
The list of default values the app restores on every load is a copy of the originals. If tomorrow we add a new setting and forget to put it on that list, that setting would carry over from the previous game again. We haven't found a way to close that fully without making something else more complicated, and we'd rather say so.
In the meantime, if you play Delta Force and then jump to Elite Dangerous, the military radio stays in Delta Force. Your ship answers you with its cockpit voice.