Just starting this off by saying I had a lovely discussion with some of the engineers at the Voice and Audio teams at RDC this year, and they directed me to make this post. Thanks again for chatting with me!
As an event organizer, I am building in-game, full sized virtual conventions for 50 different sci-fi communities to join together, interact, and have fun. As with any convention, we have presentations (keynotes, award shows, etc) which we currently need to use off-platform voice calls in order to share live presentation audio from our speakers.
It would be a huge win for our team if we had the ability to enable voice in our very large servers (as large as 500 players in one server last year, limiting to ~250 this year to address perf concerns) but with a specific caveat: only giving certain players the ability to speak (say a group of 5-10) at any given time.
This opens up a few key possibilities for massively multiplayer experiences:
- For convention style events like Astral Central, you can have panelists and keynote speakers deliver their presentations fully in-game, eliminating the need to have a parallel call or livestream open to get the full experience. Selective speakers would also prevent audience disruption at the engine level, so long as its adjustable at runtime. (i.e. with a
game.Players:SetActiveSpeakers({players})function or something along those lines) - For music artists and concert experiences, this enables 100% live concerts with larger audiences, which is currently not possible. Having the ability to limit the ability to speak to certain players would allow a production team to limit the ability to broadcast audio to the artist and maybe 1 or 2 other hosts.
My discussion with an engineer on the Voice team also brought up the idea that with the Selective Speaker system, it would be much easier from the engine side to support larger servers like the ones we use for our events, as only a very small amount of players would be able to actively transmit audio at any given time. It would be as if the voice chat system were working in a 10-player lobby, albeit being audible by a much larger amount of people.
This would finally close the loop for our convention events to be fully on Roblox, as presentation audio is currently the only engine-level limitation we have to deliver a full convention-style experience to our audience of several hundred sci-fi fans and creators from all across the globe. If this issue were to be addressed, we could continue to improve our events (and many others could as well!) to push for these larger events to be fully contained on Roblox in a way which is safer than needing to rely on external platforms.