As those of you who follow Wonderblog know, release testing is one of the favorite parts of my job. Today we were doing a final test to decide if "Dev5" – the 5th developer release of Project Wonderland v0.5 – is ready to release. We were quite pleased with the results of the test. We ran through adding objects to the world using the cell palette and drag-and-drop. We manipulated the objects once in world and tested out object-level security. We randomly generated new avatars, and we tested a host of audio features including mute, reconnecting the softphone, and changing audio quality. Here we all are sitting around an audio recorder recording silly things. We played them back, and then got confused about which voices were in the recording and which voices were live. Then you can see us visiting an Egyptian temple (found in the Google 3D Warehouse).
After convincing Deron to get out of the box of donuts Paul provided as a testing treat, he started up Firefox for us. We were all happy to see the return of shared X applications!
Jon also had a surprise for us. He added a nifty module for monitoring client memory usage and other important statistics. This should make it much easier to track down memory leaks and troubleshoot a host of other problems (I apologize for forgetting to take a screen shot).
We only found one show-stopper bug related to the security component. Fortunately Jon thinks the problem is easy to fix, so we’ll do a quick retest tomorrow to verify the fix and then you should be seeing a Dev5 release announcement in the next few days.
Great news! The new render engine, and host of new features are looking amazing.
I spent the whole of yesterday importing ferraris and famous landmarks (from Google Warehouse) to see how they rendered, and I can report… Absolutely Great!