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Local Development

This guide explains how to work with a local copy of VinTest components rather than NuGet/VSIX versions — useful when you are developing VinTest itself or testing unreleased changes.

Using local Vintage Story installation

The convention among mod projects is that instead of hardcoding C:/Path/To/Your/VintageStory/, in your .csprojs, you should use VINTAGE_STORY property pointing to your own local Vintage Story installation directory (the one that contains VintagestoryAPI.dll).

Why?

This makes life easier for other developers if you share your project sources (f.x. on GitHub).

If you hardcode your local paths everywhere, then just by getting sources of your mod folks would end up with already invalid paths. Which they'd have to amend for themselves right away. And by doing so, they immediately risk breaking the setup for you, if they decide to propose changes to your mod back (through pull requests), and the changes accidentally include the amended paths.

<Reference Include="VintagestoryAPI">
    <!-- BAD: expects people to have disk E:, have exactly VS 1.22.2, have it installed exactly there -->
    <HintPath>E:/Games/VintageStoryManaged/1.22.2/VintagestoryAPI.dll</HintPath>
    <!-- BAD: expects to have VS exactly three directories above the mod workspace -->
    <HintPath>../../../VintageStory/VintagestoryAPI.dll</HintPath>
    <!-- GOOD: everyone decide for themselves where their VS is -->
    <HintPath>$(VINTAGE_STORY)/VintagestoryAPI.dll</HintPath>

To fill this property with a value, you can:

Directory.Build.props
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<Project>
  <PropertyGroup>
    <VINTAGE_STORY>C:/Path/To/Your/VintageStory/</VINTAGE_STORY>
  </PropertyGroup>
</Project>

Ignore that!

This file contains a local path that will be different for everyone, so add it to .gitignore.

If multiple values are provided for property X, dotnet resolves them in this order:

  • environment variable X=1 is used as a fallback if everything else fails
  • —> it is overridden with <X>2</X> value from .props file, if present
  • — —> if .csproj defines its own <X>3</X>, it is used instead of the value from .props
  • — — —> if the build is triggered with flag -p X=4, it overrides everything else

Same thing for VinTest.Cake

--vs-path falls in the same steps:

  • envvar VINTAGE_STORY is used as fallback
  • <VINTAGE_STORY> from Directory.Build.props is read, if present
  • both are overriden by explicitly providing --vs-path argument to dotnet run

Using local VinTest builds

The cleanest approach is to add a Directory.Build.targets file (and add it to .gitignore), swapping the NuGet package references for local project references:

Directory.Build.targets
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<Project>
  <ItemGroup Condition="'$(MSBuildProjectName)' == 'YourMod.gametests'">
    <PackageReference Remove="VinTest" />
    <ProjectReference Include="../vintest/VinTest/VinTest.csproj" />
  </ItemGroup>

  <ItemGroup Condition="'$(MSBuildProjectName)' == 'CakeBuild'">
    <PackageReference Remove="VinTest.Cake" />
    <ProjectReference Include="../vintest/VinTest.Cake/VinTest.Cake.csproj" />
  </ItemGroup>
</Project>

Each <ItemGroup> targets a specific project by name:

  • '$(MSBuildProjectName)' == 'YourMod.gametests' — matches the gametests project.
  • '$(MSBuildProjectName)' == 'CakeBuild' — matches the Cake build project.

Adjust the Include paths to point to wherever your vintest/ directory is relative to the mod workspace.

When you are done with local development and want to go back to NuGet versions, simply delete the Directory.Build.targets file or comment out its contents.

Building the VS Code extension from source

cd vscode-ext
npm install
npm run compile

After successfully building the extension, install it in VS Code via the Developer: Install Extension from Location... command, pointing it at the vscode-ext/ directory.

After each recompile, reload the VS Code window (Developer: Reload Window) to pick up the updated extension code.

Instead, you can use npm run watch to trigger automatic recompilation every time a .ts file changes.