How to test faster

[raresn]

So now, to test on an android phone, we compile the aab, then we install on device... this can take up to 3-4 minutes per test.
Any way to hot-swap the swf only? How do you guys test?

[dmunsie]

I test 99% on PC and only test on mobile when a milestone is reached or something vital has changed. Yah, it takes a couple of minutes to build and deploy. But when you only do it a few times a day, week, etc, no biggie.

[GeneralVimes]

Same :) Device is needed only for the final tests of correct SDKs integration

[FliplineStudios]

Same here, I'll install on a device when I need to test multi-touch or when adding/updating an ANE, otherwise I just test on PC while developing and wait until the end for on-device playtesting.

[raresn]

@ajwfrost What about compiling faster? :) Right now this is a single core process - anything we can do in that direction maybe?

[2jfw]

FlashBuilder was using incremental compiling asfaik.
IntelliJ, and likely other editors too, do not use this, which causes a full compilation all the time.

Since FlashBuilder was able to trigger it, there seems to be logic compiler-wise, to not compile all.
Would it be possible to extend the compiler to use incremental compiling by default?
Compiler seems to accept "-incremental=true" arg.

[ajwfrost]

Hi all

Flash Builder used the 'old' compiler - I don't know that the 'new' compiler properly supports the incremental mode. We can perhaps do some checks on this - although, the reason for still having the 'old' compiler (from the Flex SDK) is that the 'new' compiler doesn't support MXML. We are still hoping to switch way from using the Adobe 'new' compiler to instead use the Apache Royale compiler which supports both AS3 and MXML, and I believe also has a lot of optimisations around performance and incremental approaches...

Regarding the packaging of an AAB or APK file, these can take time because we found we needed to restart the Gradle process each time, and it essentially does a full clean build of the project. When debugging, I tend to use it to create an Android Studio project and then I go in there and can just update the SWF file - but I have to do a 'clean project' and then build and deploy, often also uninstalling the app on the device otherwise various optimisations/caches seem to prevent the 'new' functionality from working properly...

Probably a better mechanism would be for us to have the ability to monitor an output location and when an updated SWF file appears there, to automatically re-package this in an APK file that has also been set up. Our challenge here is just there are so many ways that people can set up their projects and different IDEs etc, we have to try to make it generic! But let me discuss with some other folk and see what we can do...

The re-loading of SWF files automatically is something we wanted to put in place. There are issues with how the AS3 runtime keeps definitions in memory though (as well as JIT code etc) which would likely mean that a full app re-start is going to be needed. Maybe we can look at having a different framework that handles this...

thanks

[raresn]

Just checking in if there is any progress in this area. Thank you.