Windows Changing the output location of compiled debug builds or setting a max number of saved builds

[Yizzard]

Hi so I have no idea how I can't find this information anywhere as I feel like this should be a problem that affects a lot of people but often when I work for a long time my computer will run out of space because all of the debug builds (I'm not sure if that's the right word, but the game builds that are generated when you hit debug in gamemaker are what I'm referring to) taking up so much space. These builds are always cleared at the end of the day, but I was wondering if there was a way to tell Gamemaker to only keep the latest like 5 or something like that so that it would automatically delete all older builds past the fifth most recent or something. If that's not possible then can I at least change the output location of these so that I can have them output to my secondary HDD as opposed to my much smaller primary SSD? That would also probably solve the problem.

 

[gnysek]

I'm using GMS 2 since first day, and I didn't noticed that... I wanted to say that there's no issue like this, cause I would notice that since I'm not closing IDE for 15 days in a row now (just putting my PC to sleep), but then I found, that when I go to: %LOCALAPPDATA%/GameMakerStudio2 or %LOCALAPPDATA%/GameMakerStudio2-Beta, there's indeed about 60 directories named <ProjectName>_<RandomHex>_VM and they are using about 1 GB of space. I also noticed, that there's no folders older than two days, but in that case, I should that this shouldn't be a suggestion - you should report it as a bug!

There's indeed problem with creating random folders on every "debug" run.

 

[kburkhart84]

I just checked this out. The IDE deletes ALL that data when you exit. But it does seem to store an extra folder for each debug/run test. On my Escape of the Clowns Jam entry the folders are only about 18MB each, but I'm sure on bigger projects that is much higher and adds up quickly. I'm guessing they did it this way to save on speed, by not messing with deleting and re-writing every time, rather just saving the deleting part for when the IDE closes. It would be best if they could simply cache these files(like how they cache the files they use to build in the first place). That would save the most time I would think, although in the case of smaller files it is possibly faster to just create it real quick than to take time to check for changes and then write it.

If there is an actual valid reason behind it, maybe it should be considered a suggestion instead of a bug.

 

[Yizzard]

Yeah I did realize that restarting the IDE deletes them but still would prefer to not have to do that whenever I run out of space, my game is currently like 200-300MB or something like that so it adds up real quick, especially when I'm doing something that requires a bunch of very small balancing adjustments so I'm restarting the build every like 2 minutes lol. But yeah, definitely would be nice if there was a way around this, so maybe I should put it in as a suggestion then if there's no way to do it in the current version.