We're back again with a significant update featuring major improvements and fixes, but first, some context.

Since introducing speakers with the help of 56738, our system has relied on PannerNodes, a web standard for 3D audio rendering. VoiceChat was added shortly after and expanded on this foundation. Unfortunately, these web APIs have been poorly maintained for years. Several critical bugs—reported years ago—remain unfixed in Chromium with little likelihood of resolution.

These issues caused noticeable audio crackling, and their unpredictable behavior led to more severe problems including connectivity issues and excessive resource consumption. Many players reported significant FPS drops as their computers struggled to keep up.

After careful consideration, I made the difficult decision to move away from these default rendering systems and develop our own solution, which I'm excited to release today!

Changelog

• Regions
  • Fixed the sync-regions config option, which was completely being ignored
• Speakers
  • Fixed issues with synchronization on redstone speakers, specifically the reset playthrough on power loss feature, which got borked a few updates ago
• Web Client
  • Audio Rendering
    • Migrated to the custom spatial audio system
    • Added new customization options - letting you change how strong you want the stereo effect to be, more granular control over volume roll-off (how quiet audio becomes over distance), and one quick instant toggle to instantly disable spatial audio at all (affecting speakers and voicechat)
      
      
    • Added fallback mechanism to a more boring volume-based system for browsers that don't support workers
    • Fixed some browser polyfill methods, restoring compatibility with Safari on older macOS versions
    • Changed how (and when) the client tries to interpolate between location data
  • UI
    • Overhauled the login page to be more 'generic', making it fit in easier with your own styling (colors and image)
      
    • Overhauled the bedrock login flow to be more stable and easier to follow
    • Completely redesigned the onboarding page, which now better explains where a user needs to click and what their options are
      
      
    • Changed the navbar styling - it will now go transparent on the voice-chat page to better fit in with the rest of the UI components below it
      
      
    • voice-chat peers now show their state in loading messages, making possible connection issues way easier to understand
      
• Misc
  • Fixed API binary distribution in the documentation
  • Fixed issues with the documentation site not loading assets on mobile
  • Minor bug fixes