Comments on: Two “Gotchas” Developing Plugins

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 14 Sep 2017 14:36:13 +0000

In reply to Ben Supnik. Much appreciated - I can understand your problems with this. I will do some research with the ATC guys and put together a list of what is needed.

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Thu, 14 Sep 2017 14:30:00 +0000

In reply to Michael. Please file a bug and include all 'stuck' datarefs. We do want to fix some of this, but it's a surprisingly long-tailed problem, since the instrument indication simulation system wasn't really meant for this.

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 14 Sep 2017 14:27:00 +0000

My plugin disables the plane path. A side effect of this is that X-Plane does not update the groundspeed dr – fair enough – but neither does it let me write the groundspeed to it. This means that the Virtual Airline fraternity cannot get hold of this and other variables for ATC using XSquawkbox and similar.

Is there any chance Ben, that this restriction could be lifted for the relevant variables? A lot of people ask me for this and I can’t see a way to implement it without modifying XSquawkbox etc.

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Thu, 14 Sep 2017 14:26:53 +0000

In reply to Michael.

That’s a good idea – certainly for plugins beyond a certain size, developing outside X-Plane is a huge in…Sandy and I did that for the SDK 1.0 itself.

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 14 Sep 2017 14:13:50 +0000

My ttechnique for faster development of plugins was to recompile the SDK as a set of stubs that did nothing but return a void or zero to be compatible with the SDK’s function declaration. This allowed the plugin to run without X-Plane and be tested within the Visual Studio debugger. Obviously there are things that you need the real X-Plane for, but I was able to do much of the testing this way and save a whole load of time.

By: Chris Long

Chris Long — Sun, 10 Sep 2017 18:42:18 +0000

In reply to Brian Mackie. lol

By: Brian Mackie

Brian Mackie — Sat, 09 Sep 2017 19:40:14 +0000

Richard, please go forth and multiply…

By: richard

richard — Fri, 08 Sep 2017 13:05:41 +0000

when relased x-plane 11.10 this weekend ?

By: Steve.Wilson

Steve.Wilson — Tue, 05 Sep 2017 17:05:53 +0000

Thanks for this developer-centric post, Ben. Been testing at PMDY for years. The locals know me well, but wonder how I can afford so many different aircraft. Definitely want to give that environment variable a try, and Windows 7 was apparently never “fixed” as far as the app compatibility wizard is concerned. 😉

For those testing plugins not needing anything outside the cockpit, they can help their ACF load times overall by temporarily removing complex 3D elements from the aircraft’s Misc Objects for highly detailed aircraft, and their frame rates by using Sandy Barbour’s drawing disabler. http://www.xpluginsdk.org/misc_plugins.htm