Getting started with OpenFL and Haxe in VSCode: My first-time experience

Haxe
#21

Our Lime VSCode extension has just been updated to 1.3.0 with a number of great changes – including intial debugger support!

EDIT: HashLink and debugger support both require Lime 7.3 or greater – to be released.

Here are the steps:

1.) Select “HTML5” (or “HTML5 / Debug”) from the target configuration selection
2.) Select “Debug” > “Start Debugging”
3.) The first time you will be prompted to select which debugger to use. Select “Lime” from the list and it will create an auto-generated launch config JSON for you
4.) Select “Debug” > “Start Debugging” again

The plugin uses the “Debugger for Chrome” extension by default, but you can also go to Settings and change the “lime.browser” setting to Firefox or Edge if you prefer (these require the “Debugger for Firefox” or “Debugger for Edge” extensions, respectively)

EDIT: There are surely ways that the extension can still be improved – contributions welcome :smile:

4 Likes
#22

To add to what Joshua said - a launch config is only auto-generated if you don’t already have a launch.json. If you do, just add this configuration:

{
	"name": "Selected Target",
	"type": "lime",
	"request": "launch"
}

Right now this supports HXCPP, JS and Flash debugging, with HL support coming soon.

#23

I checked out the code from Github yesterday to give the lime launch a try, and it’s working nicely for me! :smile:

1 Like
#24

Yesterday and today, I tried building an OpenFL app for Android, and I ran into some issues.

I assumed that I could simply install Android Studio, and it would provide the correct SDKs, but I guess that’s not the case. I ran lime setup android and specified the paths to the SDKs that Android Studio downloaded. When I tried lime build android, I was getting this error:

arm-linux-androideabi-g++ is not recognized as an internal or external command

(I’m on Windows 10, by the way)

I found a couple of topics here in the forums mentioning that error, but no clear solution.

I found the Lime: Setup Android page that suggested specific versions of certain packages, so I figured that something must be wrong with using the latest SDK/tool versions. However, I determined that Android Studio lacks the capability to choose specific versions of certain tools, and my best guess is that this is probably why the Android build was failing for me when I used Android Studio to install the SDKs.

In the end, I ended up manually downloading the SDK and NDK and installed everything from the command line using sdkmanager.bat. However, even then, there were some issues.

Here was my first attempt to install what was needed, based on the versions mentioned in the Lime docs:

sdkmanager.bat "platform-tools" "platforms;android-19" "build-tools;24.0.1"

I also manually downloaded NDK version r13b, as suggested in the docs.

My first build attempt with the new SDKs ended up with some error mentioning “Android 26”. So, I tried installing that platform version instead of 19:

sdkmanager.bat "platforms;android-26"

This seemed to work better because the build made it further in the process, but then I got this error:

:deps:extension-api:processReleaseResources FAILED

FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

* What went wrong:
Execution failed for task ':deps:extension-api:processReleaseResources'.
> com.android.ide.common.process.ProcessException: org.gradle.process.internal.ExecException: Process 'command 'c:\Users\josht\Development\Android\sdk\build-tools\24.0.1\aapt.exe'' finished with non-zero exit value -1073741819

I next tried to install a newer version of build-tools:

sdkmanager.bat "build-tools;28.0.3"

One more build, and I finally found success! I tried lime test android next, and the app opened on my device connected over USB.

If it’s possible to get this working with Android Studio, I think that the process needs to be be documented because Google’s page strongly encourages you to download Android Studio to get the SDK. I don’t think that everyone is going to figure out that they need the standalone SDK when things fail with Android Studio, or how exactly to find it.

The versions of the various tools that are required to build for Android should probably also be updated on the Setup Android page too, assuming that they are indeed out of date, as they seemed to be here.

I do not necessarily feel confident that I have everything set up correctly or in the simplest way possible, and I’m wary of the idea that something might break unexpectedly in the future if I ever update Lime.

1 Like
#25

Thanks Josh

We usually find that Google’s tools work best if you have the latest version of the platform build tools – I can’t think of a time that we’ve needed to recommend that they be downgraded.

It is possible to use custom SDK versions through <config:android target-sdk-version="" /> but we do need to pick something. We currently target API 26 because this is the latest version of the SDK that we directly use features from – but this is not the minimum – we support back to around API 11 (I believe).

The sticky wicket right now is that HXCPP lacks clang support for Android, GCC support was removed in Android NDK 16. I have a pull request where I was working on this issue: https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/hxcpp/pull/707 (it appears there is also a newer one: https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/hxcpp/pull/742)

Hopefully this can be resolved and we can just say “install the latest”

Android Studio (on Linux) asked me to unzip “wherever”… I’m not sure if there would be a way for us to check an environment variable or standard install and discover the SDKs ourselves, or to know that you only have a newer API version installed?

#26

You may be able to auto-detect some things on Windows and macOS. Android Studio installed the SDK on my machine in c:\Users<username>\AppData\Local\Android\Sdk. Somebody on StackOverflow says that it’s /Users//Library/Android/sdk on macOS.