Comments on: X-Plane SDK Roadmap | User Interface and Avionics

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Fri, 08 May 2026 17:50:20 +0000

In reply to quantumac. You could probably port the drawing to PanelGraphics and then use our TTF support.

By: Dellanie Byron

Dellanie Byron — Thu, 07 May 2026 13:08:46 +0000

In reply to TOM KNUDSEN. That sounds more like a Window API thing?

By: Dellanie Byron

Dellanie Byron — Thu, 07 May 2026 13:05:27 +0000

In reply to quantumac. Well maybe you'll check out our panel graphics :)

By: TOM KNUDSEN

TOM KNUDSEN — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 09:11:03 +0000

I appologies if my prevous comment was off topic.
Question, will the new SDK be able to use OS-level window positioning. I came accross to me an limitation when making a typical map plugin. Seems the plugin window cannot be moved to another monitor depending on how X-Plane is configured I guess. At least my plugin seems to be float only using OpenGL. I read that I most likely can now use XPLMGetAllMonitorBoundOS and XPLMGetWindowGeometryOS, but that would mean using Global OS desktop coordinates which I don’t know how to use. Will the new SDK be more suitable for these types of challenges?

By: quantumac

quantumac — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 15:02:19 +0000

I got tired of waiting and wrote my own OpenGL-based widget library. It’s not the most sophisticated or fastest thing, but at least it resembles X-Plane’s GUI, which is what I was after. Unfortunately, it only supports one font because that’s all XPLMDrawString supports these days. I looked at ImGUI but it didn’t seem to render widgets which looked like the rest of X-Plane.

By: Dave Whyte

Dave Whyte — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 20:29:42 +0000

All amazing Ben.
Thanks very much for all your work, much appreciated.

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 21:37:41 +0000

In reply to Lionel.

We are looking to someday allow rendering to happen on other threads, but not by letting you launch a ton of threads – the model will be that you can schedule a job in our thread pool so we don’t oversubscribe the CPU. You’d get the win though if the user has spare CPU coers.

By: Steven Wilson

Steven Wilson — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 19:30:50 +0000

Many of us are still drawing avionics graphics to the panel.png – in my case using SASL. You don’t have to tell me this isn’t optimal – you’ve mentioned this before more than once. But can you give me an idea of just how non-optimal it is, in terms of performance? Conversion is a cost/benefit thing, especially in the payware world.

Overall this is very exciting stuff. Cockpit elements have come a very, very long way since I started during X-Plane 9!!

By: Lionel

Lionel — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 16:55:27 +0000

Looks very promising! Will we able to have separate drawing threads for different devices/windows?