X-Plane Python3 Plugin "XPPython3"

⚠️CAUTION: Work-in-progress:warning:

This is an updated version of Sandy Barbour's excellent Python Interface plugin, allowing you to create plugins for X-Plane using Python. Sandy's was restricted to Python2, this is the update to support python3.

It's called XPPython3:

1. "xpython" already exists (it's an all python version of python)
2. "3" to emphasize it is python3, which is not fully backward compatible with python2.

Key features:

• X-Plane 11.50 minimum: There is no attempt to make this work on older versions of X-Plane. This plugin can co-exist with the older plugin, so if Python2 is still available it can be used with the older plugin. (Python2 is end-of-life.)
• 64-bit only: X-Plane is now 64-bit only.
• X-Plane SDK 303 minimum: This is base SDK version for 11.50. Vulkan/Metal and OpenGL are supported.
• Python3 only: This will not work with python2 programs which are not compatible with Python3. Note that this will support any Python3 minor version (greater than 3.3). Unlike previous python plugins, you won't need one plugin version for Python37 and a different one for Python38, etc.

Building

See README_BUILD for build instructions.

• Linux, tested on Ubuntu18 with gnu compiler,
• Mac, developed and tested on Catalina 10.15 with Xcode compiler (command line only),
• Windows, tested on Windows 10 with mingw-w64 tools. Might be compilable with VisualStudio, but I don't care.

Ultimately, we'll be providing a set of pre-built binaries for distribution. (Separate user-facing website not set yet.)

Installation

See README_INSTALL for user installation instructions. This will be part of the user-facing website.

Development of Plugins

See README_SDK for additional information on building your own plugins using Python. We'll include differences between the older Python2 plugin interface and this Python3 version.

Python Stubs

Because the XPLM* modules are contained within a shared library, they are not useful for support tools such as pylint. For this reason, we've included a set of stubs. Include the stub directory as part of your python path (during development) and pylint will be useful. For example, include this in ~/.pylintrc:

[MASTER]                                                                                    
init-hook="import sys;sys.path.extend(['.', '/path_to_stubs/PythonStubs'])"

Examples

Python code exercising each interface is in XPython/examples directory, organized primarily one example per module.