A standalone Windows editor for Dying Light XUI documents.

Run the portable build

You can either run the release, an artifact from the Actions page, or build the executable yourself.

The self-contained Windows x64 build is one executable:

artifacts\publish\win-x64\DyingLightXuiEditor.exe

It does not require Unity or an installed .NET runtime, and it does not need framework DLLs beside it. Native WPF components are unpacked to .NET's per-user single-file cache when the editor starts. Dying Light assets are not bundled.

On first use:

1. Open Settings > Dying Light Resources.
2. Choose the Dying Light folder containing DyingLightGame.exe and DW\Data0.pak.
3. Select the preview language and keyboard/controller prompt set.
4. Optionally choose a writable mod workspace, add Dying Light project or loose-resource folders, and add standalone texture definitions or RP6L .rpack files.
5. Use File > Open Stock XUI to browse the installed screens, or open a loose .xui file directly.

No separate extraction is required for stock XUI, strings, fonts, or menu textures. The editor indexes loose installed data, base and patch PAKs, DLC PAKs, the selected locale with English fallback, and both base and locale-specific menu RP6 RPACKs. These sources are always read-only. Opening an installed or extracted file requires Save As into the writable workspace before it can be saved.

What is implemented

• Lossless XML loading and token-level editing. Unchanged documents are never rewritten, and edits preserve unrelated bytes, comments, whitespace, duplicate properties, unknown nodes, line endings, and encoding.
• Atomic same-directory saves with one backup, external-change detection, undo/redo, recent files, and isolated recovery snapshots.
• Session-only document tabs keep several loose, stock, or recovered XUI files open at once. Each tab retains its own selection, undo history, hierarchy and timeline state, viewport camera, reference overlay, and recovery snapshot. Tab tooltips show the full file or virtual asset location. Save All saves every dirty tab while Ctrl+S and Save As target only the selected tab.
• An indexed, virtualized, fixed-height hierarchy with stable expansion state, debounced search, collapse/reveal commands, breadcrumbs, and synchronized selection. Rows can be dragged onto other elements to reparent them, onto a sibling's upper or lower edge to reorder them, or onto hierarchy whitespace to return them to the canvas root; the move is validated and undoable. Eye and padlock icons distinguish direct and inherited editor-only visibility/lock states without modifying the XUI. A row context menu can hide everything except that item and its subtree, then restore the exact prior visibility state.
• A retained DrawingVisual canvas with transform-only pan/zoom, fit, actual pixels, rulers, three independently colored grid tiers, the stock 90% safe-area overlay, snapping, declaration-order compositing, clipping, selection bounds, and hidden-editor-style move, resize, rotation, and pivot handles. Camera gestures temporarily flatten the retained HUD layer so a 4,000-node canvas does not have to be recomposited for every pointer move. Dragging inside an already-selected element keeps that semantic XUI owner even when a visual template or overlapping canvas node is painted above it; Alt-click cycles overlapping owners. Committing a move, resize, or rotation also preserves the selection while the lossless document model is reparsed.
• One-click transparent PNG export at 2× authored design resolution. The lossless PNG contains the current visible XUI pose, textures, text, transforms, clipping, opacity, and editor hide overrides without the editor background, reference image, grid, rulers, selection handles, or unknown-control bounds.
• An embedded, facts-only Dying Light class/property catalog drives the typed Common and Advanced inspector views. Unauthored inherited defaults appear as ghost values and serialize only after editing; Reset removes the authored property. Add Property is searchable, class-filtered, typed, and retains an explicit raw/unknown escape hatch. Evidence, default source, animation support, and preview accuracy are visible in inspector tooltips. Invalid values remain visible with diagnostics instead of being silently normalized. Authored properties can be copied as a set, individual rows can be copied directly, and Advanced Copy offers a searchable picker that can also include inherited defaults. Paste filters the set against each selected destination class, protects Id and ClassOverride, skips incompatible values, and commits a multi-element paste as one undoable edit. Raw XML is materialized only when expanded; subtrees over 256 KiB require an explicit load action. IUIText nodes expose a typed ColorControlSequenceEnabled checkbox. The inspector and hierarchy provide undoable Add child and identity-preserving Add parent workflows for groups, images, text, antialiased rectangles, stock buttons, and validated custom XML. Add property inserts a validated raw property on the selected node without rewriting unrelated source bytes. The element palette also exposes the stock class catalog and its observed default dimensions.
• A semantic text section decodes legacy TextStyle into bold, italic, underline, horizontal alignment, and vertical alignment while preserving every unmapped bit. Decimal and hexadecimal raw editing remains available. Existing standalone formatting/alignment properties remain standalone and override the bit-derived preview; Dying Light bottom alignment authors VerticalAlignDown.
• Dying Light anchors, pivots, transforms, opacity/show inheritance, keep and resolution flags, stack/wrap-panel layout, visual templates, stock control families, evidence-backed material profiles, forced-mask substitution, DDS textures, atlases, tilesets, and nine-slice definitions. Pivot authoring supports unrestricted XYZ values, a 3x3 preset grid, raw-runtime and preserve-visual-position modes, timeline-key rebasing, and an explicit animated-scale/rotation restriction.
• Hidden-editor visibility tools select the parent group, mask or gray outside its bounds, force-show the current group or all elements, and include or exclude design-time elements. Six-way navigation links resolve direct IDs and ..\ paths, visualize missing/ambiguous links, and support safe drag assignment or clearing without guessing.
• Direct install-backed resolution for PAK and RP6L/RPACK assets. In particular, HUD definitions referring to hud_dw resolve the real hud_dw.dds atlas from the installed menu packs.
• Automatic custom-project resolution. Opening an XUI below data\menu\... indexes that project's data tree first, including sibling texture definitions and nested DDS files, before configured mod, extraction, and install sources. Loader-owned PakAssets\XUI files resolve through the sibling PakAssets tree.
• Persistent resource settings for additional Dying Light project folders, loose-resource trees, extracted roots, individual .def/texture-definition .scr files, and individual RP6L .rpack containers. Explicit sources override installed game assets and remain read-only where appropriate.
• Installed localization binaries come only from the selected Dying Light language PAKs, with English fallback; extracted copies cannot override the chosen language. Explicit Locale\<language> catalogs in configured projects, workspaces, loose-resource roots, or RPACKs remain supported. basicfonts.scr, fontstyles.scr, .fm bitmap metrics, game input glyphs, and locale-specific font-atlas DDS resources are indexed alongside them. Exact engine bitmap fonts are used when available; Unicode-capable Windows families are used as diagnosed CJK/Thai fallbacks while an atlas is unavailable, and an incomplete atlas cannot replace readable Unicode with question-mark glyphs. Enabled %COLOR(RRGGBB) and %COLOR(reset) sequences render as per-run system-font and bitmap-font colors; disabled or malformed markup stays literal like the game.
• A separate asset catalog browses screens, visuals, textures, and fonts through the existing resolver. Texture drops can create MyImage nodes or rebind ImagePath; auto-size is always explicit. Installed PAK/RPACK entries stay read-only and require Copy to Workspace. Loose workspace XUI screens and visual libraries can be created, opened, renamed, and recoverably deleted. Exact references can be inspected and rebound through a content-hash preflighted, backed-up, undoable atomic transaction; archives are never rewritten.
• A composed preview for hidden/runtime-populated HUD elements, per-node force-show controls, and a variable-opacity reference screenshot overlay. A compact effective-state explanation below the Animation slider reports authored, animated, controller, ancestor, opacity, clipping, and off-canvas visibility, with one-click force-show and composed-pose recovery.
• Full 60 Hz timeline parsing with independent per-owner scope state, scope-local playback/scrubbing, exact stepped-key transitions, interpolation/easing, named frames, loop diagnostics, and undoable timeline commands. Tracks are filtered to the selected elements; Include descendants expands each selected hierarchy subtree without crossing into nested independent timeline scopes. Trackless selections disable transport instead of playing unrelated owner targets, while switching selections remembers each scope's local tick. New documents open in a non-destructive composed pose that settles each scope at its earliest fully visible key; Stop returns the active scope to authored tick 0 before playback. Safe timeline-only changes update just the affected retained visuals and transform/show subtrees, with a full-layout fallback for layout- or resource-sensitive changes.
• No background music, UI sounds, novelty transparency, or blocking alpha warning.

Unknown engine-only controls are transparent in the preview. Optional editor-only bounds and searchable diagnostics identify them without putting fake labels into the rendered scene.

Common controls

Action	Shortcut
Open / save / save as	Ctrl+O / Ctrl+S / Ctrl+Shift+S
Close selected document tab	Ctrl+W
Save all open documents	File > Save All
Copy / advanced-copy / paste inspector properties	Ctrl+C / Ctrl+Shift+C / Ctrl+V
Undo / redo	Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y
Duplicate / delete	Ctrl+D / Delete
Add visual child	Ctrl+Insert
Move before / after sibling	Alt+Up / Alt+Down
Indent / outdent	Alt+Right / Alt+Left
Fit / actual pixels	F / 0
Zoom in / out	+ / -
Export transparent PNG	PNG toolbar button or File menu
Focus hierarchy search	Ctrl+F
Play or pause	Space
Previous / next tick	, / .
Copy / paste keyframe	Ctrl+Alt+C / Ctrl+Alt+V

Middle-drag the canvas to pan, use the mouse wheel to zoom, and use Ctrl-click or Shift-click for multi-selection.

Build and validate

The SDK is pinned by global.json; NuGet versions and lock files are committed.

dotnet restore XuiEditor.slnx --locked-mode
dotnet test tests\XuiEditor.Tests\XuiEditor.Tests.csproj `
  -c Debug --no-restore
dotnet build XuiEditor.slnx -c Release --no-restore
dotnet test tests\XuiEditor.Tests\XuiEditor.Tests.csproj `
  -c Release --no-restore --no-build

Optional read-only acceptance tests take local game and extracted-data roots from DYING_LIGHT_INSTALL and XUI_EDITOR_TEST_CORPUS_ROOT. Checked-in tests must use portable synthetic fixtures rather than developer-machine paths or private third-party projects.

Every successful Release build automatically refreshes the self-contained, single-file artifacts\publish\win-x64\DyingLightXuiEditor.exe distributable. No separate Visual Studio Publish action is required. The executable embeds the supplied multi-resolution XUI icon.

The solution contains:

• src\XuiEditor.Core — framework-independent document, command, layout, asset, and animation logic.
• src\XuiEditor.Wpf — the Windows desktop workspace and visual-layer renderer.
• tests\XuiEditor.Tests — parser/writer, layout, asset, timeline, corpus, performance, recovery, and WPF UI tests.

Technical notes

• Architecture
• Recovered rendering evidence
• Chrome 6 editor evidence
• Runtime comparison
• Known approximations
• Validation record

The extracted game data and decompiles are research inputs only. They are not redistributed by this project.

Disclaimer

The Dying Light XUI Editor was created with assistance from AI tools.