Creating And Using Prebuilt Libraries

Cocos2d-x, like any large scale project, is made up of many hundreds of source files. You can examine the inner-workings or peer under the hood of Cocos2d-x through these source files. You can modify these files as you wish. This freedom comes at a cost, however. No, not as in money, but something much more valuable! Compiling time!!. Every time a source file is changed, the compiler must recompile all files that are part of the projects. Compiling a project costs developers time. Compiling many, many times a day adds up even more time. Fortunately, there is an easily solution. Use prebuilt, also called static libraries. This process wraps up all the source files in a project into a single library that you can use to compile and link againt in your projects. Since the compiler knows that this library has not changed between compilers, there is no need to re-compile it. This is the same as saying: "I won't touch the engine, just build on top if it". Your compile times will go down from several minutes to perhaps less than one minute.

Generating The Prebuilt Libraries For Use

Prebuilt libraries are available on iOS, macOS, Android and Win32

In-order to use the prebuilt libraries in your projects you need to compile them. This assumes that you already haave a working Cocos2d-x installation. If you do not, please refer to our installation guides.

Some examples:

# remove the 'prebuilt' folder
# without the -m flag, this builds for release mode
# generates libraries for every platform (ios, mac, android, win32)
cocos gen-libs -c

# remove the 'prebuilt' folder
# without the -m flag, this builds for release mode
# generates libraries for just ios
cocos gen-libs -c -p ios

# remove the 'prebuilt' folder
# without the -m flag, this builds for release mode
# generates libraries for just ios and android
cocos gen-libs -c -p ios -p android

# remove the 'prebuilt' folder
# with the -m flag, this builds for debug
# generates libraries for just ios and android
cocos gen-libs -c -p ios -m debug

The build process can take between several minutes and several hours, depending upon your hardware and software setup. Once complete the prebuilt libraries are located in: prebuilt/, inside your Cocos2d-x root directory. You can easily symlink to these projects, thus allowing these libraries to be used amongst several projects at once, or you can copy them to individual projects or another location that better suits your needs.

You can run cocos gen-libs --help to see all available options broken down by platform.

Using The Prebuilt Libraries In Your Projects

Using the prebuilt libraries in your projects is easy. Simply add the libraries you need into your project and set your header and include search paths. Doing this depends upon the enviroment you are using. The paths you need to add are:

Header Search Paths:

# Project level
/path_to_cocos2d-x/cocos2d-x/
/path_to_cocos2d-x/cocos2d-x/cocos
/path_to_cocos2d-x/cocos2d-x/cocos/base /path_to_cocos2d-x/cocos2d-x/cocos/physics /path_to_cocos2d-x/cocos2d-x/cocos/math
/path_to_cocos2d-x/cocos2d-x/cocos/2d
/path_to_cocos2d-x/cocos2d-x/cocos/ui /path_to_cocos2d-x/cocos2d-x/cocos/network /path_to_cocos2d-x/cocos2d-x/cocos/audio/include /path_to_cocos2d-x/cocos2d-x/cocos/editor-support /path_to_cocos2d-x/cocos2d-x/extensions
/path_to_cocos2d-x/cocos2d-x/external /path_to_cocos2d-x/cocos2d-x/external/chipmunk/include/chipmunk

# Target level
/path_to_cocos2d-x/cocos2d-x/cocos/platform/ios /path_to_cocos2d-x/cocos2d-x/cocos/platform/ios/Simulation

Include Search Paths:

/path_to_cocos2d-x/cocos2d-x/prebuilt/ios