Building with two projects at the same time

I’m currently messing around with bluetooth multiplayer and it’s been a blast so far. The only downside is the much longer turn-around cycles for developing the network code to test on two devices. On the PC it was a bit cumbersome as well, but I could always just run 2 instances side by side locally. I guess if I had spent a little extra time to allow for Wi-fi AND bluetooth I could test with one device and 1 simulator, but it’s still always going to be slower than single device testing.

I had made a post about this a little while ago with running from a single project in XCode. Brian Stormont mentioned I could have multiple copies of the project all referencing the same source files. I finally gave that a try and it does make things a bit easier and allows for simultaneous debugging, but speed of deployment only seems a tad faster, if at all. When compiling from both projects it appears the 2nd project to be compiled is significantly slower and/or waits until the first one is finished. I guess that’s the problem with running a single instance of XCode with multiple projects.

Also if you try to compile at the same time while targeting 2 different devices but with the same configuration you’ll run into a lot of build errors. Creating a new configuration (akin to Debug-2 or something similar) allows the copied project to output it’s files separately without having any contention of the original project for file handles and such.

Thanks to all for their support on this blog and support for Tilt to Live! It’s been an awesome year and lots of exciting stuff coming up as we roll into 2011. You probably won’t see another post here until early January, so have a happy holiday!