Add SFX Bus Signal to Radio (Voice) Bus

[SonarSoundSB]

Hi there,

We are using the dissonance for FMOD plugin in our game for voice chat which uses a ‘Voice’ bus, and have a walkie-talkie item which on holding down a button switches the bus to a ‘Radio’ bus for effects etc. We’d like to route the signal of the SFX bus of the transmitting player into the radio bus when they transmit so we can hear what’s going on around them as they talk. In theory this should work as the transmitting player can’t hear their own voice on playback, I’m assuming this can’t be done on the Studio side as we’d get a duplicate signal and phasing.

We’ve had a couple ideas like creating a dsp from the sfx bus of the talking player and piping that into the signal created by dissonance. Also somehow using an extra listener, unsure of where we’d grab the signal of the second listener though and what that would mean for seperating any other sounds like music and UI from that signal chain.

What would be the simplest way to achieve this effect?

Thanks so much for your time!

[FMOD_Aaron]

Hi Steve!

Thanks for reaching out. This one sounds like an interesting workflow - I love the idea of passing through the SFX bus into the radio transmission!

First up, to clarify, we can’t offer any support directly using Dissonance for FMOD as it’s a 3rd party solution, but we can of course help out with FMOD itself!
Just to make sure I’m understanding correctly, your current setup in overview is:

SFX bus for Sounds
Voice bus for player’s VO (using dissonance)
Radio bus for the effected signal
Then in game, the player wouldn’t hear their own Radio bus.

With this current setup, you should be able to send the signal from the SFX bus into the Voice / Radio bus without phasing issues. If I’m understanding your setup correctly, while you are sending a duplication of the signal, the player who has that SFX mix won’t be hearing it, as the Radio bus isn’t audible to them.

In terms of spatialization & listeners; as you’d be hooking into signal at the mixer level, the spatialization will already be applied so you shouldn’t need to have any additional listeners or anything, at least from FMOD’s side.

That said, I could be missing something here, so please do let me know if so!

Could you also give me some more info on how your mixer is set up for this process? I made a quick concept mockup using busses for SFX, Voice & Player, then using a Return for the Radio effect. I’m then using an Overriding Snapshot with an ADSR on Intensity to ramp up the Send levels:
Note: In this setup, the Radio return would be audible, but as I’m not familiar with Dissonance’s workflow, I couldn’t replicate that particular piece.

You could also use Snapshots to automate the effects directly on the Voice Bus, removing the need for the Radio return, but both ways would work!

For now though, once I get some more info on your setup I’ll be able to clarify everything into a more condensed solution for you.

All the best,
Aaron Edwards
Product Manager for FMOD

[SonarSoundSB]

Hey Aaron,

Thanks so much for the reply and info, apologies for the delay in responding!

Yeah it should be cool if we can get this working no doubt!

Here is the mixer on my side

In my head it feels like there’s no way this can be done on the studio side unfortunately, any attempt I’ve made at routing in the mixer from the SFX groupto the Radio group results in phasing (I tried putting a radio return under the radio group for that to work)

From what I understand (Dissonance code is out of my level) I’m guessing it’s creating a channel and routing that to to the specified bus (Radio) if you’re not the person that’s speaking (total guess) so I would assume any routing done on the studio side will just result in signal being piped to your own mixer.

I feel like dissonance needs to grab the DSP from the talking player’s SFX group and pipe that into the channel created by dissonance.

But yeah I just needed to know if this can be done on our side or not and maybe you’d come across this before! The dev was asking if we could use an extra listener and route that somehow?

Thanks so much for your time Aaron!