Ran into this while testing Reah. Basically, syncSoundSettings is normally called by the UI any time you leave the menu, however it is not called when launching the game (including when loading a save), which means the engine has to call syncSoundSettings itself.

I think it would make sense that if the exiting the UI sets the sound mixer to the expected state by default, then it should be set correctly by default when the game launches too.

I think it is probably not safe to just call syncSoundSettings in runGame because engines may expect things to be set up a certain way before syncSoundSettings is called, however I believe it should be safe to just initialize the mixer.

From what I can tell, every existing engine except for Drascula calls Engine::syncSoundSettings in its own syncSoundSettings override, and if the engine calls its own syncSoundSettings override during startup (which Drascula does) then it won't matter anyway because it'll override this new behavior.

So, basically this removes the need to call syncSoundSettings from the engine on startup, which should make engine init slightly simpler.