Does Galaxies feature 3D audio? How about occlusion?
Star Wars Galaxies utilizes 3D positional audio. The system is not only left/right directional; but front/back filtered as well. When a player is facing a sound-emitting source in-game, such as an ore mining facility, the player hears that sound with full frequency range. When a player turns away from the ore mining facility, a low pass filter is applied to the sound making it slightly more muffled. This filtering effect is even more apparent in quad or 5.1 speaker setups. The Galaxies audio engine does make use of occlusion as well through software volume reduction and filtering. This creates the impression that the sound source is being heard through a wall. This effect is quite apparent when a player is indoors and there is blaster battle happening outside. Galaxies also supports environmental reverb. This effect is most apparent when a player transitions from an outdoor to an indoor environment, such as player houses, spaceports and government buildings.
