Did you install the VS2015 or VS2017 build tools? I'm going to guess 2017 - it seems that Microsoft has made some changes with VS2017 and no longer sets an environment variable pointing to the c++ compiler.
Perhaps try installing the VS2015 build tools. I have had no issues targeting Windows with VS2015 installed, but my machine with VS2017 can't build for Windows.
Is there any major downside to deploying a game targeting Neko versus Native (Windows in this case)?
I imagine performance might be slightly worse due to the VM, but are there any other issues to be aware of? Unfortunately, right now I can't test performance of the native build myself - just Neko.
I'm running into an issue when I try to build against a Windows target. From my searches, it looks like the issue is tied to how Visual Studio 2017 sets environment variables. Long story short, because they were worried about people's ability to install multiple VS2017s side-by-side, they decided to not use system environment variables.
Using advice from older posts on a couple different forums, I tried to add the environment variables myself (tried adding both VS150COMNTOOLS and HXCPP_VARS -- did not work). I also tried running VsDevCmd using the Developer Command Prompt for VS2017 - did not work either.
I do not have this problem with building the HaxeFlixel game on another machine that has VS2015. So it's definitely tied to VS2017.
Last thing to note is that I'm using HXCPP 3.4.64 to solve another issue with compiling to C++ (see: http://forum.haxeflixel.com/topic/671/windows-build-issues/3, http://community.openfl.org/t/issues-compiling-to-c/9522/4)
Is there any updated guidance on what to do here? I need VS2017 for other projects and I don't have the disk space to install VS2015.
Thanks!