That took way longer than expected, but both of these are now implemented!
Windows Support
There’s not much to say here other than that the build server now allows both 64-bit and 32-bit Windows targets, so I’ll talk a bit about the changes I’ve made to the process for compiling the build server’s Docker image.
Normally for each platform Defold supports, you either need to have the SDKs or do some surgery on the Dockerfile to remove it entirely. Once that’s done, you would run a command like:
$ DM_PACKAGES_URL="http://localhost:9999" ./server/scripts/build.sh
I’ve changed it so that every platform is disabled by default and requires an environment variable to re-enable. For example, if you have the Windows SDKs (that’s Microsoft-Visual-Studio-2019-14.25.28610.tar.gz and WindowsKits-10.0.18362.0.tar.gz) you can set a flag to enable support for building Windows games:
$ WINDOWS_SDK=1 DM_PACKAGES_URL="http://localhost:9999" ./server/scripts/build.sh
The exception to this is Linux which is always enabled. That’s because 1) I like Linux and 2) it only needs this file from LLVM’s GitHub. This is something that should be in the vanilla build server IMO, although it would probably be better to use a blacklist system instead so as to not break existing workflows.
Caching
Cargo is now set to put all compiled artifacts to a global folder, making compile times only a few seconds on subsequent builds! This is kind of a hacky way to implement a cache, but I still can’t figure out sccache and Stack Overflow says it’s probably fine to do. The only caveat I’ve heard is that it might break if two projects depend on the same version of the same crate but with different feature flags. This should be pretty rare and since the build server isn’t ready for serious use anyway, I think it’s an acceptable risk.
I imagine some people will want to give this a try now that it works on Windows, so I’ll recommend No Boilerplate’s 10-minute Rust overview to learn the language’s basic syntax and features. His videos (and music (and podcasts)) are really some of the best out there!
After all the trial and error this one took I’ll be going through and cleaning up everything while I think about what to work on next. Managing different Defold versions is still a big problem that needs to be solved and there are still plenty of dmSDK functions to write bridges for. Either way, this project is a lot of fun to work on and I hope to get another update out soon! 