When building from the simulator on Mac, there are caches present in the Solar2DPlugins dir and also under ApplicationSupport->corona and there are some seemingly low-level issues that the simulator faces from time to time in lifting the necessary files from these places.
Especially when trying to fetch paid plugins from places like the Solar2dMarketplace, the process can be a nightmare and there are new error messages every time with lua files going missing for the simulator environment or the plugin simply not downloading for mobile builds. I think there are also some systems in place now that prevent paid plugins from being cached so even when they do download successfully, they seem to be deleted so the process of deleting the caches and constantly attempting rebuild just goes on and on.
I was looking on the forums and others have also faced these issues and there isn’t much documentation on what exactly the simulator is doing behind the scenes and how users can try to deal with these problems. The cache under the Application Support path doesn’t seem to be talked about anywhere but still clearly plays a part in the builds.
I’d be grateful if someone could please give a general idea for how the plugins are being cached and what we can do to make the build process more consistent when using plugins that are not hosted by coronalabs. I’d be quite happy to then compile things into a good startup guide for everyone’s benefit.