08-08-2015, 09:30 PM
![[Image: 50.jpg]](https://dolphin-emu.org/m/user/blog/progress-report/2015-july/50full.jpg)
In the spirit of previous release candidates, this is the official 5.0 Release Candidate thread! After the July Progress Report, we've noticed that there have been some misconception and confusion about the new release. This thread is meant to clarify some of those issues, and provide everyone with a place to talk about the release, ask questions, and talk about testing.
To reiterate what was said in the July Progress Report, 5.0 is being handled differently. Instead stopping all development, testing, and then making the release as we have done in the past, Dolphin 5.0 is following a divergent development method. Dolphin 5.0 was forked away from Dolphin-master at 4.0-6727, and master has continued to develop. This kind of breaks the usual naming conventions and will take some getting used to, but this allows us to keep making Dolphin awesome while working on a release. Remember that the 5.0 release candidate is separate from the development builds; do not assume that because something is fixed/broken in master it is fixed/broken in the release candidate!
Also, the 5.0 Release Candidate is following a rolling release model. Basically, there will not be a single release candidate, but multiple ones as bugs are fixed and changes made, much like development builds. They will be labeled 5.0-rc-1, 5.0-rc-2, etc etc. After each new release candidate is released, this thread will be updated with a notice. And feel free to ask any questions you may have here as well!
Right now, what we need more than anything is testers! 4.0 had two bugfix releases because it didn't get enough testing before it was released, and no one wants that to happen again.
Here are some tips for really good testing:
- Run the Release Candidates with all of your games! It's important that we test as many as possible. If a whole lot of people just play all of the games they have and report anything odd, it will go a long way to testing them all.
- Try everything the game has! Use that secondary item that you avoid because of how lame it is, play a few minutes of that awful minigame that you never touch, try the multiplayer you haven't tested for a while, on and on. Most of the bugs in the main gameplay of popular games are caught and fixed fairly quickly, but even popular games can have regressions hiding in things that most people don't bother using. Fixing weird little bugs like that will commonly fix big bugs is lesser know games!
- Use weird settings! Dolphin 4.0 actually released with single core completely broken!. An important component of the emulator was totally non-functional, and no one knew because no one had bothered to even try it! So, try running a few of your games with unusual settings, like single core, disable Idle Skipping, or XFB Virtual/Real. And you can try all of those weird things you never use, like Enable Screen Saver, Enable Wireframe, Texture Format Overlay, Show Statistics, on and on. Making sure those all still work is important too.
When you find something weird, you can talk about it here, in the IRC (#dolphin-emu on irc.freenode.net), or post an issue report with [RC] in front of the name.
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Hopefully that will be addressed soon. But it will still show the proper release candidate name in the titlebar.