Workaround for 'ducking' gameplay audio during dialogue using Google VR plugin?

I’m transitioning an existing project to use the new Google VR spatialisation plugin. Prior to now, we’ve ducked gameplay sounds and music when dialogue plays by sidechaining from a “Dialogue” group, connected to compressors on “Gameplay” and “Music” groups.

I see from Joseph’s answer about GVR and routing structure that the GVR listener bypasses the normal group mixing and routing.

Has anyone had success with a workaround for treating sounds as groups in GVR? I got as far as this: I can do a pre-panner send of all dialogue to a ‘signal analysis’ group which contains a sidechain—but is itself inside a muted group so no extra sound is output. However, that still leaves the question of how to duck gameplay sounds based on the sidechain signal. Even if I were to put compressor effects on every single gameplay event (yuck), I’m not able to connect those to the sidechain on the dialogue analysis group.

I’m stumped! Any advice would be most appreciated.

Unfortunately, there is no easy solution to this; As of the time of writing (May of 2017), there is no way to use the GoogleVR plugin in conjunction with mixer group buses.

A solution would need to act upon the event instances, themselves.

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Thanks for the reply Joseph. Yikes, that’s a bummer. It sounds like we’ll have to give up a lot of control of the overall mix in order to use GVR, at least in its current form. Does GVR do it this way because of a fundamental limitation of how FMOD’s mixer works? Is there an alternative mechanism GVR could theoretically use to implement spatialization in a group-friendly manner?

Failing that, since the GVR listener operates like a transceiver, could it use numerical channels, as transceivers do? That way you could safely have multiple GVR listeners. Or even better, what if GVR listeners only listened for events within their own mixer group?

As I understand it, Google designed the plugin to function this way for performance reasons; The possibilities you suggest would significantly blow out the plugin’s resource costs.

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