PlayStation | PS5

If you're concerned about spoilers this source says there is none:

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2023/08/sea-of-stars-making-of-documentary-is-the-perfect-primer-ahead-of-release

"If you're concerned about spoilers, then fear not: we've already watched the documentary ourselves and can confirm that it doesn't go into any key story details. Rather, the developers talk more about the technical aspects of the game, like pacing, lighting mechanics, and day/night cycles - that sort of thing."

PlayStation Plus Game Catalog for August 2023 will be available today Tuesday 15th August.

Sea of Stars will be available when it launches on 29th August.

PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium | Game Catalog

Sea of Stars | PS4, PS5

Moving Out 2 | PS4, PS5

Destiny 2: The Witch Queen | PS4, PS5

Lost Judgment | PS4, PS5

Destroy All Humans 2 Reprobed | PS4, PS5

Two Point Hospital: Jumbo Edition | PS4

Source of Madness | PS4, PS5

Cursed to Golf | PS4, PS5

Dreams | PS4

PJ Masks: Heroes of the Night | PS4, PS5

Hotel Transylvania: Scary-Tale Adventures | PS4, PS5

Lawn Mowing Simulator: Landmark Edition | PS4, PS5

Spellforce III Reforced | PS4

Midnight Fight Express | PS4

PlayStation Premium | Classics

MediEvil: Resurrection | PS4, PS5

Ape Escape: On the Loose | PS4, PS5

Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice | PS4, PS5

Categorized by game titles

"It's probably easiest to talk about Tempest-based 3D Audio and the Dolby device support in terms of Ambisonic audio, which is increasingly popular these days [note there are other strategies for 3D Audio, including ones that use discrete 3D audio objects, but situation is rather similar).

Ambisonic audio can be viewed as a pretty radical extension of stereo audio. With stereo audio, the game's audio engine (or the middleware being used) will add a sound source into one or both channels based on its location - if the source is to the right of the listener it's primarily added into the right channel, and so on. With Ambisonic audio, there are a lot more channels - fifth order is very common and uses 36 channels, so it allows pretty good locality to the audio.

A sound source is then added into those 36 channels based on location; the math is a bit more complex than when using stereo but not overwhelmingly so. Because the audio processing is channel based (albeit at 36 channels rather than 2 channels), the audio designer keeps very good control of mixing, filters, etc., and strategies like dynamic range compression (where audibility of certain important audio such as player character voice is ensured] can be used as usual.

The Ambisonic audio channels are then handed off to the Tempest 3D AudioTech engine for rendering, which is to say that the Tempest engine uses the player's HRTF and the speaker locations to create an appropriate audio stream for each speaker. The Ambisonic audio channels encode all directions, including above the player; even if rendering for headphones, this is very important, because it allows a sound "above" the player to be processed in such a way to sound as if it is truly coming from above - this is of course where the HRTF with its encoding of head and ear shape comes in.

Up until the most recent update, the Tempest engine would render the information in the Ambisonic channels into headphones, stereo TV speakers, and 5.1 and 7.1 audio setups. Now 7.1.4 has been introduced, with its four overhead speakers, but really nothing changes in the overall Tempest rendering strategy - the 36 Ambisonic channels already include audio coming from all directions, including above the player. To put that differently, the support of the four overhead speakers is "first class" support, they are

Also note the rendering latency for these new speaker setups is identical to what it has been in the past for stereo, 5.1 and 7.1. As a result, the 7.1.4 experience for existing games should be quite good. It is true that the game teams could not test with these speaker setups but support should be pretty automatic, the necessary game audio data is already there in Ambisonic form. Going forward, there's an opportunity for improvement as the sound designers can verify the highest quality of audio on 7.1.4 speaker setups as well.

• Mark Cerny, Lead System Architect of the PS5"