X-Plane Remote Access Plugin and Client Library
X-Plane Remote Access Plugin and Client Library Documentation

Introduction

The X-Plane Remote Access (XPLRA) plugin provides a gateway to external applications to access some internals of X-Plane. This document describes the plugin and its usage. It is assumed that the reader is somewhat familiar with the X-Plane plugin SDK. The plugin currently works on Linux and Windows, but porting to Mac should be easy. If you would volunteer, let me know! :)

The XPLRA plugin allows the extern applications to perform the following:

  • Get and set the values of datarefs either individually or in batch. Batches can also be pre-registered in case the same set of datarefs is to be queried or modified several times. This avoids having to send and resolve the dataref names every time.
  • Query the versions of X-Plane, XPLM (the plugin manager) and XPLRA.
  • Show a message in a window for the pilot for a specified amount of time.
  • Register and then monitor hotkeys.

Currently the plugin can be accessed locally, i.e. from the same computer that runs X-Plane, but extending it with TCP/IP-based or network access would not be difficult. While client libraries are provided for C, C++ and Python, the communication protocol between clients and the plugin is open and is described in this documentation. So you can write your own client library, if you wish.