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Stencyl and versions

This is not about code-versioning but about problems with new versions of operating systems and tools in general.
This weekend I played with unRAID and other stuff to get a better development workflow.

The unRAID KVM (virtualization) required all my VMs to export to Open Format and once they started on KVM it was slow.
When my new hardware arrives I might revisited this


So before I decided to buy some new hardware I was going to test with an old Acer i5 laptop.
Already I have a beast of a machine :
iMac core i7 with 16 GB of memory, but the hard disk is still an old SATA one.


There are some youtubes out there on how to open up your iMac and change the drive. But .. I’m not so handy of a person.
On some systems I can easily swap out disks, but when you
need special bathroom type of equipment to open your device I pass.
There are a few things to consider when looking for something different:

  • Every X months Apple is coming out with new stuff
  • When you update before Stencyl is ready you get into trouble
  • Mixing libraries (from Stencyl and others) is not a good idea

  • The same is kind of true for Windows. Visual Studio releases can cause issues as well.

    So ideally I want to keep a set together :
  • Apple OSX + Xcode + Stencyl for that build
  • Windows XXX + Visual Studio + Stencyl for that build


  • Also I like to keep up with the latest Stencyl build, but want a regular Stencyl build to do the core development on.
    Last year I had Stencyl 3.4 on my iMac and since the 3.5 beta releases I was switched to a Windows 8.1 VM with a VC Studio that belonged with it.
    When I put the iMac to sleep while a Stencyl project was open in the Virtual Machine it corrupted the xml file. At least it did that so many times that I changed my habit.
    Running multiple OS X installations from a desktop is possible using Parallels.
    But this costs money and in the past I had VMWare player for something else and it required each x years a new version.
    So I did not want to get on the same train again.

    A virtual Machine running on VirtualBox for OS X is something that can be done but it requires a kind of hack i.e. : Hackintosh
    In the past I had a hackintosh build but it was slow and a hassle to get a run to an iOS device.


    ESXi/XenServer/HyperV : I’ve experiences with ESXi and XenServer.
    The reason I don’t want to use these hypervisors is that it is not easy to move a virtual machine between them and/or VirtualBox.
    KVM test was also not very user friendly relating to migration of VMs. The most user-friendly for me is the VirtualBox method.
    When I’m not at home I still want to develop on my laptop. A VirtualBox VM will do just fine!

    So this is what I came up with for my work flow:
    iOS : For iOS and Mac publication we need hardware. The Mac MINI or one of the older MacBooks can still run Sierra/El Capitan.
    It is slow but it will produce the goods. use an image created by DiskUtil to run on MacBook Pro (4 GB, Core 2 Duo).
    It is extremely slow but when you can publish to both linux/windows/android and html5 it should work just fine
    Android: Windows, Linux and Mac OS X can build for android.
    Publish to a site and you can test all your android devices. When you successfully test on different Androids you are probably good to go for iOS as well.
    Windows: This can be done perfectly from a Virtual Machine
    Linux: Perfect publication from Virtual Machine
    Mac OS X: Like iOS we need hardware for this. Hackintosh is probably going to hurt you in the long run. MacBook/MacMini can be used to create this.
    Flash: Linux, Mac and Windows can produce and run flash. So use Linux or Windows VM rather than the MacBook images.
    HTML5: Same as Flash: All platforms can produce it. Using Windows or Linux VM will be best.