Hey thanks for the response. Your reference to the interface designer pointed me into the right direction. I saw a page on your site that had a gif that explained it immediately.

The readme file is not very clear what to do with the VST SDK. The confusion starts in the first section vstsdk is referenced alongside aax alluding to the wrong file structure.
...
tools/SDK/
tools/SDK/VSTSDK/
tools/SDK/AAX
...
Its a different file that tells about the "pesky underscore" and the .bat file that need to get dealt with.

This is how I got it to work

1. Unzip VST_SDK
2. Open unzipped SDK and run the batch file to copy vst2 to vst3.
3. Rename the folder VST3_SDK to VST3 SDK
4. Place renamed folder into hise-master\tools\SDK\

As far as vs2015 i really dont want to go through all that trouble building a layout for an offline machine. So i will just wait on that one.

The program crashes when I try to link a knob to a parameter. Also it doesn't seem to recognize vs2017. So no custom GUI and no export of vst. It took me two hours to figure out the file structure for the sdks. Then it tells me no path found when I try to export. Better documentation would have been appreciated. So no custom gui and no export. Without these two features I doubt it will ever be usable for me.