Contributing guidelines

July 15, 2026 ยท View on GitHub

Style guide and formatting

Avoid manually wrapping lines in markdown files.

The project is setup to automatically configure VSCode with the proper extensions and settings. Fixers and formatters will be run on save.
Project configurations for other IDEs are welcome.

You can run dotnet format to automatically format csharp files according to .editorconfig.

Compiling

Requirements:

Then either:

  • Run dotnet build --configuration Release, or
  • Open LiveSplit.AutoSplitIntegration.csproj in Visual Studio 2022 and build.

The LiveSplit assemblies needed to compile (LiveSplit.exe, and dlls) are vendored under lib/. See lib/README.md to refresh them.

Previewing the settings UI

The component's settings panel is a WinForms UserControl. To preview visual changes without installing the component into a real LiveSplit, run scripts/preview-settings.ps1. It builds tools/PreviewSettings (a throwaway .NET WinExe that reads the component's Settings control by reflection and feeds it a minimal LiveSplitState) and launches it. Buttons are inert since there is no host.

The tool works on Windows directly. On Linux it runs under wine, whose bundled Mono renders WinForms through wine's own graphics stack, so text and layout match Windows and the real LiveSplit host. Native Mono is intentionally not used: it renders quite differently via libgdiplus, on top of having known rendering bug, which defeats the purpose of a visual preview.

Changelog

If your change is user-facing, add a <change> line to the version="0.0.0" <update> block in update.LiveSplit.AutoSplitIntegration.xml, in the same PR. Entries there reach users only once promoted into a real version at release.

Do not modify version="0.0.0" or the <Version> in LiveSplit.AutoSplitIntegration.csproj (fallback for local builds). The real release version comes from the manifest: the newest non-0.0.0 <update version> is what gets released automatically by .github/release.yml.

Releasing a new version

We use LiveSplit's built-in component auto-updater: LiveSplit polls the factory's XMLURL, and offers an update when a listed <update version="..."> is newer than the installed component's Version.

To publish a release, run ./scripts/bump-version.ps1 X.X.X with the new version, then commit and push to main.

The Release workflow then validates the manifest, builds with the manifest's version, and publishes a vX.Y.Z GitHub release+tag with the .dll + .pdb attached.

If a release fails partway, just re-run it from Actions > Release> Run workflow after fixing the issue. The tag is only created on a successful publish, so there is nothing to delete or clean up first.