[Client Beta] Acoustic Simulation: Emit audio with presence!

Updates Announcements
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Hello creators! :waving_hand:

Acoustic Simulation is now in Client Beta and can be used in published experiences - occlude, reflect, and diffract to your heart’s content!

With Acoustic Simulation enabled, any 3D audio emitted using the Advanced Audio API (including audio assets, voice chat, and/or character sounds) will now behave similarly to the real world.

These sounds will be muffled by structures, bend around corners, and echo off of the environment. Create a room that blocks noise when you close the door. Make a winding hallway where users can hear foes from around the corner. Sculpt a large stone cave that echoes emitted sounds within and throughout.

Check out our video introducing Acoustic Simulation :backhand_index_pointing_up:

How do I use it? :woman_teacher:

  1. Set AcousticSimulationEnabled to true on SoundService
  2. Emit audio using instances from the Advanced Audio API

With Acoustic Simulation comes the following properties:

Click here to expand

Acoustic Simulation interplays with these existing properties:

Click here to expand
  • VoiceChatService.UseAudioApi: Determines whether voice chat is constructed with Advanced Audio API instances or not
    • In new experiences, this is Enabled
    • In older experiences, this may be either Automatic or Disabled
    • Set this to Enabled to have spatial voice chat acoustically simulate!
  • PhysicalProperties.Density: Determines how strongly a material occludes sound
    • Parts which are thicker and/or have higher density will result in more sound muffling

For more information on the Roblox Audio API, we have this helpful API overview as well as tutorials on 3D Audio and Voice Chat.

Caveats :red_exclamation_mark:

Similar to visual rendering features, Acoustic Simulation is integrated with our rendering quality system, which attempts to strike the optimal balance between performance and quality for a user’s device. This means that reverb, occlusion, and diffraction may lower accuracy or turn themselves off if necessary to maintain frame rate. We plan to continue optimizing this system so we are interested to hear your feedback.

Thoughts, questions, feedback? :speech_balloon:

If you encounter any issues or have any feedback for us, please let us know!

  • At this time, Acoustic Simulation requires using the Advanced Audio API; however for the full release we plan to also support Sound instances

  • We are exploring additional properties for more granular control and configuration of Acoustic Simulation

A big thanks to @DinoCoderMom, @ReallyLongArms, @FlossTycoon, @cognitivetest_306, @Doctor_Sonar, @phri, and @PeacefulSquirrel for making this possible.

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This will be useful for horror games I am pretty excited to try it out

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this is good roblox

(but my soul remains destroyed because of the archival of lounge)

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very excited for the diffraction effects!

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atleast some good news

  • Fun fact: sounds can be minus decibels
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Finally, the current audio system is… good enough ig

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Cool. But… what are the performance penalties of using this?

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Need some performance numbers for this one, what’s the price of turning this on in a dense forest full of chirping animals

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Really nice feature overall, but for some reason I feel like there’s an unknown amount of backlash happening somewhere in the forums

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Really? I thought it would never be this way, can’t wait for it! Thanks, Roblox!

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Does it interact with Terrain, and more specifically, Terrain water?

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Couldn’t this give someone a big advantage? E.g. imagine you’re playing a tactical shooter game, and someone’s slight movements are being muffled & barely audible from the wall they’re behind. If a acoustic sim is disabled for the aggressing player, they would hear the player through the wall whereas someone with acoustic sim enabled would not.

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I’m very excited to use this, and I’m glad that it will move to Sound instances as well since AudioEmitters and wiring is a little more complex.

I wish there were rules about keeping comments relevant to the post, it really takes away from the accomplishments being made toward a more better engine. I’ve been keeping up with the new audio api for a long while and it’s so nice to see reallylongarms going out of his way to improve the systems as well as the team who works on the audio system

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A good update in 2026 is crazy. I never heard of it before. Maybe you guys should do this more often?

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sounds is ray tracing, but there are only two pixels

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It does consume some resources; there are a bunch of physics queries happening in the background to compute filtering, arrival direction, and reverb, but we aim to make it as lightweight as possible. If you enable it and find performance issues, please report it as a bug

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Can we have the 3d pathfinding of the soundtrack integrated into the pathfinding service as 3d option for planes and birds?

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at least we still get a good update after… that

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I’ve been waiting for this for SO long!!!

Why must it arrive only after the removal of our beloved face pngs. :weary_face:

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