Only heard right

The Godot work has stopped since May for various reasons, but my next big step is sound.

I created a new Godot project and just added a few buttons and wired them up to playing WAV files. Basically a simple as possible soundboard.

The sounds did play, but only out of the Right speaker. Same sounds in Mplayer worked fine.

Step 1: What had I done wrong?

• Checked the Godot AudioStreamPlayer settings, nothing.
• Checked the Godot Audio Bus settings, nothing.
• Checked the Godot Audio settings, nothing.
• Checked the Godot Audio settings advanced mode, nothing.
• Changed the import settings on my WAV files, nothing.
• Added a true stereo MP3 into the soundboard and it also only came through the right speaker!

Step 2: Where had I gone wrong?

The Linux system had no problem at all playing sounds correctly. The Godot setup in every respect appeared to be set up correctly.

wpctl status

and

pw-link -l

both showed Godot opening two channels. One for FL and one FR. Front Left and Front Right.

Step 3: What had gone wrong?

Godot was built with support for PulseAudio and ALSA. Apparently there is a small bug with Godot that causes it to allocate a none existent audio device bus for the left channel when it thinks you might be using surround.

This is not an issue for the big distros as the sound stuff is baked in, but for my Gentoo local build with conflicting audio drivers ... not so good.

Step 4: The fix (and the break)

I added -pulseaudio to the package.use and rebuilt Godot ... but forgot I was running a Linux VM in VirtualBox and brought the system/s to their knees. Which would have been bad enough, but the build failed when it could not write any cache files and the file-system became Read Only.

Luckily a reboot and fsck fixed it and even though there were quite a few and varied issues to "Y" there seem to have been no losses.

Then I was able to rebuild Godot and then finally I could hear sound in both speakers!

Step 5: Next steps

Try out AudioStreamPlayer3D in my minesweeper game...

I printed something

It's not that exciting, but I used Blender to create a Phone Cradle to ensure my phone sat correctly on my wireless charger.

I have had the charger for a couple of years and it has only failed to charge 2-3 times. But of course the day I wake up and it has not charged it is a BIGG DEAL!

The brief was very simple; orientate the phone so that it was on straight and the inductive coil was over the charging area. It is pretty lax on the exact placing, more on that later.

It was an iterative process, which 3D printing is ideal for.

• A: sizing the phone
• B: sizing the charger (has a cable on the left)
• C: thickening, was far to flimsy
• D: basic positioning
• E: penultimate design
• F: exactly the same as E: but with ever so slightly different sizing. (not shown)

I was expecting to have to try different locations and test for best charge through put, but found an image of the Pixel 7 Pro open and the exact location of the charging coil.

Works great!

Where is July?

July got cancelled.

But I found Ancient Dungeon had been updated with so many extra bits I had to spend every waking moment playing it. FYI this is a bad thing!

The developers of Unloop Unloop responded almost straight away to my review and then happily accepted my detailed technical bug report.

Got an email last week saying they have already addressed some of my concerns and hope to improve the frame-rates going forward. Which is great news because the game is good.