I’ve gotten a handful of emails from third-party devs recently asking the question:

I have a bunch of XPWidget-based windows. When will I be able to use them with fancy new features like UI scaling, pop-out support, VR support, etc.?

Happily, the answer is: now!

I really buried the lede on this one, but back in X-Plane 11.20, as part of adding plugin support for VR windows, we added a new “mode” for XPWidget-based plugins. It all starts with a call to opt-in to the “modern” window APIs like this:

XPLMEnableFeature("XPLM_USE_NATIVE_WIDGET_WINDOWS", 1);

From this point forward, all widget windows you create will be backed by a modern XPLM window, and can therefore be used with all the new XPLMDisplay APIs. All you have to do from there is call XPGetWidgetUnderlyingWindow() get the XPLMWindowID of your window to pass to those APIs.

About Tyler Young

Tyler is a software developer for X-Plane. Among other projects, he was in charge of the X-Plane 11 user interface and the massive multiplayer implementation.