We have a few APIs available for developers who want to build flight visualizations for X-Plane Mobile’s massive multiplayer.
There are two concepts used throughout many of these APIs:
- Flight ID: This is a unique identifier that persists for an entire flight. If you’re animating aircraft across API updates, you can use this to track which aircraft is which.
- DSF: In X-Plane terminology, a DSF is a file that provides scenery for 1 degree latitude by 1 degree longitude. DSFs are named in latitude-longitude order for their southwest corner. Positive values are north or east, and negative values are south or west. So, for instance, +49-068 covers the scenery from 49 degrees north and 68 degrees west up to 50 degrees north and 67 degrees west.
Please note: At present, there is no metering on MMO API usage by third parties, but we ask that you be considerate of our server load and avoid making unnecessary requests. (For instance, if you start making frequent requests to get all 64,800 DSFs on the planet, we’ll have to cut you off!)
With that in mind, the available APIs are:
- //mmo.x-plane.com:4000/api/v1/world/count
- Just gives the number of users currently connected
- //mmo.x-plane.com:4000/api/v1/world/summary
- Gives the flight IDs of all aircraft online, organized by DSF. We use this in the app to draw “circle” heatmaps like this.
- //mmo.x-plane.com:4000/api/v1/world
- Gives the flight ID, latitude, longitude, elevation (in meters above mean sea level), and heading (in true degrees) of every aircraft online. This is limited to 3 decimal places in precision for latitude/longitude, and it only updates once per second. So, when your map gets zoomed in far enough, you’ll want to request data for the specific DSF you’re viewing.
//mmo.x-plane.com:4000/api/v1/dsf/[dsf_id]- //mmo.x-plane.com:4000/api/v1/callsign/all
- Flight IDs with their associated callsigns. Note that not every flight is guaranteed to have a callsign registered.