General Documentation
| Title | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Testing in X-Plane | 16 Mar 2021 | This document outlines how to test X-Plane via CLI commands and telnet. It explains key commands, debugging, and provides a sample test script text file. |
| Plugin Guidance for OpenGL Drawing | 4 Apr 2020 | Guidelines for using OpenGL to draw from X-Plane plugins running inside X-Plane’s process. Plugin-drawing is supported only via OpenGL. |
| Plugin compatibility guide for X-Plane 11.50 | 3 Apr 2020 | X-Plane 11.50 and newer contains to option to run in Vulkan, Metal or OpenGL. This guide explains what's compatible and what needs to update for plugin authors. |
| Building and Installing Plugins | 24 Oct 2017 | Discusses platform-specific considerations for compiling & distributing plugins on Windows, macOS, and Linux. |
| Developing Plugins | 24 Oct 2017 | An introduction to the plug-in system, including the basics of how to set up plugins. |
Available APIs
- XPLMCamera
- XPLMDataAccess
- XPLMDefs
- XPLMDisplay
- XPLMGraphics
- XPLMInstance
- XPLMMap
- XPLMMenus
- XPLMNavigation
- XPLMPlanes
- XPLMPlugin
- XPLMProcessing
- XPLMScenery
- XPLMUtilities
- XPStandardWidgets
- XPUIGraphics
- XPWidgetDefs
- XPWidgets
- XPWidgetUtils
Tech Notes
Aircraft
| Title | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Moving the Plane | 10 Jan 2018 | This tech note describes how to position the user's aircraft or multiplayer aircraft in X-Plane. |
Data Access
| Title | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Plugin Traffic Wake Turbulence | 19 Feb 2022 | |
| Overriding TCAS and providing traffic information | 15 Apr 2020 | With X-Plane 11.50, plugins that display traffic in X-Plane, whether auto-generated or from an online multiplayer network, have to use the XPLMInstance API to draw these aircraft in X-Plane's world. |
| Datarefs for the CDU screen | 12 Jul 2019 | Datarefs to read the contents of the X-Plane default FMS Control and Display Unit (CDU) screen. |
| SDKRawData | 5 Dec 2012 | This guide contains some of the raw data used to generate the SDK. It is probably not of general interest, but may be useful to programmers working with lots of datarefs, or adapting plugins to other APIs. |
General
| Title | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| LuaJIT | 10 Jan 2018 | This tech note describes the integration issues between X-Plane 10.20 64-bit and LuaJIT. |
| Deferred Initialization | 12 Dec 2017 | This article explains limitations on plugins due to loading early in the X-Plane init sequence. |
Graphics
| Title | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| OpenGL State | 10 Jan 2018 | This note covers the differences between the 3 OpenGL states and how to handle them in your plugin. |
| Plugins and Objects | 10 Jan 2018 | This tech note describes how plugins can interact with objects. |
| Screen Coordinates | 10 Jan 2018 | This tech-note describes the various coordinate systems in X-Plane. |
| Drawing Rules | 10 Jan 2018 | A tech note with guidelines on plugin drawing in X-Plane. |
Sound
| Title | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| OpenAL | 10 Jan 2018 | This tech note explains how to use OpenAL in an X-Plane Plugin. |