What causes audio not occluded by walls?

Spatial audio attenuates by distance but ignores geometry, so a sound behind a wall is as clear as one in the open, which breaks immersion and gives away positions.

How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Fix Audio That Isn't Muffled by Walls

Quick answer: Add audio occlusion that low-pass filters and attenuates sounds blocked by geometry, using raycasts or the audio engine's obstruction features.

Audio heard clearly through walls is missing occlusion. Adding obstruction fixes it. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Detect obstruction

Raycast (or use the audio engine's geometry occlusion) from the listener to each audible source to check whether a wall blocks it. Distance attenuation alone treats blocked and open sounds the same.

2. Filter occluded sounds

When a source is blocked, apply a low-pass filter and reduce its volume so it sounds muffled, as real sound through a wall does. This restores immersion and stops clear audio leaking through geometry.

3. Scale by obstruction amount

Vary the filtering and attenuation by how much is blocking the sound (thin wall versus thick), so partial obstruction sounds partially muffled rather than a hard on-off, which feels more natural.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.

Reproduce it once with full context and the fix writes itself. The hunt is the expensive part.