Hey, I'm a UI designer working inside custom engine implementation of Noesis. I'm having a hard time using Noesis tools (Studio and Visual Studio Code NoesisGUI extension) as engine programmers set up work environment in a particular way.

You see, when working with ResourceDictionaries, path to them does not lead to a .xaml file, but to the .xxaml file. This .xxaml file is our own internal wrapper holding links to used viewmodels, engine configuration, and of course actual path to the .xaml file engine needs to load. This also holds true for texture files as instead of .jpg or .png extensions they lead to custom .xtexture format as well.

This quirk makes plugin for Visual Code mark it as an error and doesn't see contents of the files from resource dictionaries. So intellisense can't really help with those links, and files look like they have permanent error.

In the engine everything works fine, but if I could use XAML preview from Visual Code that would be very helpful, not to mention Intellisense hints working properly. Is there any way to make plugin recognise those shenanigas by some custom configuration?

Hello,

Without knowing more details about your integration (this would probably require a call, so please feel free to arrange one), my initial assessment is that the .xxaml files should be hidden and managed transparently by your engine or integration layer. From the perspective of Noesis Studio and VSCode, the project should expose and work directly with the actual .xaml files. This is the expected workflow and the only way Studio and VSCode can provide full functionality.

Regarding textures, supporting additional file extensions is possible. If your custom renderer and the corresponding provider understand the .xtexture format, Studio and VSCode should be able to display those assets correctly. However, this requires configuring Studio (or the Language Server) with a provider capable of loading and interpreting that custom file format.

Thanks for the answer!

I won't be able to hold a conversation about how it is implemented, as I'm more of a UI designer than a programmer really. I write some simple scripts and bits of UI logic but Noesis integration is far beyond me.

What I'm looking for are possible solutions to how all provided Noesis tools are broken by our quirks in integration, and I'm first looking for solutions outside of it to not bother other departments :D

.xtexture is not an image format as far as I understand, but also a wrapper file that holds an image inside of it. Kinda like unreal asset, as source file is stored somewhere else on the repository and is needed only for reimports.

In that case, will it still be possible to modify language server or plugin configuration to display it?

I definitely need to understand this a bit better before giving any advice.

Ideally (as we are doing in our integrations for Unity and Unreal), you have source files on one side (such as XAML, PNG, and TTF) which are edited in our tools like Studio and VsCode. On the other side, you have runtime files, which are the result of preprocessing those sources into formats like .xxaml or .xtexture. These are the files exposed to your engine at runtime.

Please let’s discuss this in a call and explore what options we have. Ideally, we would also involve the integration team in this process.