Graphics

The X-Plane SDK provides a few ways of drawing:

• Instance Drawing: Place objects at a location and manipulate these objects through datarefs. See XPLMInstance with the use of xp.createInstance().

• Direct Drawing (SDK only): Using a xp.registerDrawCallback() draw strings on the display. See xp.drawString().

• Direct Drawing (OpenGL): Using a xp.registerDrawCallback() draw whatever you like using OpenGL. X-Plane manipulates the graphics context so you can use OpenGL within the Vulkan/Metal environment supported by X-Plane. See Using OpenGL for examples.

• Windows with Widgets: Create a widget window and attach user-interaction widgets to it. See XPWidgets and XPStandardWidgets.

Additionally, XPPython3 has wrapped the Dear IMGUI library and OpenGL to provide:

• Windows with ImGui Widgets: Create a window and attach Dear IMGUI widgets to it. See Using ImGui.

• XPGL Graphics: Draw shapes, fonts, images with a pure-python graphics drawing package. See xpgl.

For details on non-SDK drawing, see:

• Using OpenGL
• Using ImGui
• xpgl