As a Roblox developer, it is currently impossible to (without super hacky methods) have spatial sound in my game.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my games because it would give players a far more immersive experience. For example, it would massively improve first-person shooters because players would be able to tell where another player is in 3D space.
As Roblox moves closer to a more realistic and immersive experience for its users, it only makes sense to completely revamp the sound engine, just like what is currently being done with lighting and future is bright.
As neat as this sounds, I don’t think Roblox will incorporate support for high-end 3D sound systems for a while. Not every household has it due to space or cost, so it would seem like extra work and development for a feature only a handful of people would utilize.
Really? When I think of DA, I think of those big heavy speaker boxes that are always advertised in movie theaters, lol. I’ll take note of this, I’d like to try it out.
There are two types. You do need special speakers to use the speaker version, but theres another headset version that works with pretty much any headset.
The main issue I have with the simulated version is the same as the simulated 7.1, it is just a glorified equalizer. It does make noises sound somewhat more 3D, but at the cost of them actually being natural. Simulated 7.1//5.1 (no difference) work by making the sounds behind you muffled. This is basically the same as trying to get a colored image displayed using only 2 color channels. Yeah, it will look somewhat acceptable, but nowhere better.
Simulated Dolby Atmos is that, but it tries to shove 2 more channels into the already indistinguishable pile of filled frequencies. Unless you have top of the line headphones with an enormous frequency span, simulated surround will sound much worse than any stereo.
Anyways, it would still be nice if Roblox offered a full 3D surround with vertical channels, given most work will only have to deal with metadata as Atmos is built upon the standard Dolby 7.1 specification.
Dolby Atmos is an object-based spatial sound engine, which means it plays sounds based on the virtual locations that they should come from in relation the person hearing the sounds. Roblox already tracks where sounds come from based on their relative positions to the camera and then decides how these sounds are played out in Stereo, so the basic framework appears to be already in place.
This means that, in theory, it’s feasible to implement Dolby Atmos using existing code.
This is just a thought. I lack access to official Roblox source code