Question possible to change "AudioManager - Default Speaker Mode" as end user? (published game)

Hello,

I'd like to enable/force surround sound in Valheim but it has no internal setup option to change the AudioSpeakerMode from it's compile-time default "2=Stereo" into anything else.

Is there any way to configure it externally / override the internal default?
Sth. like:

• an environment variable
• registry entry (Valheim stores plenty of settings @

  HKCU\Software\IronGate\Valheim

  )
• an undocumented command line argument
  
• en entry in boot.config
• hex-editing some Valheim binary/exe/dll
• in-memory hacking

The developers don't seem to care about the apparently shrinking number of gamers with surround sound setups and are ignoring the problem (several posts on reddit, steam) so I followed a modding guide to try to fix it myself but I'm stuck with some errors.
But I could verify that

Default Speaker Mode

is set to 2 in

AudioManager.asset

 

Found a way to directly edit

<pathTo>\Valheim\valheim_Data\globalgamemanagers

with UABEA and just change the speaker mode to 4/5/6/8 that way.

Distilled down it's just half a byte change any hex editor can do:

sfk.exe replace "<pathTo>\Valheim\valheim_Data\globalgamemanagers" -binary /0000803F020000000000000000040000/0000803F040000000000000000040000/

Obviously that Swiss File Knife command just replaces a

02

with a

04

(you need to add a

-yes

to actually do the modification).

I only verified this patch to work with Valheim version 0.212.9 and unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a reliable marker anywhere around the 2 in the binary data. -> the patch command above may not work for other versions!

The attached archive contains all four different version (can't foresee any legal trouble from that because the file doesn't seem to contain any copyrightable data IMHO).