XPMP2

Shared dataRefs providing Textual Aircraft / Flight Information

Textual aircraft and flight information is provided via shared dataRefs of type xplmType_Data as suggested by FSTramp. This information is offered to 3rd party plugins, which want to show (information of) AI planes like camera or map plugins.

DRE and DRT are informed about these dataRef names as soon as the first aircraft is created. So you can use either to have a peek.

Information offered by XPMP2-based Plugin

The names of the shared dataRefs follow the naming conventions known from pre-XP11.50 times when there were just 19 multiplayer planes support with similarly named dataRefs for position and configuration information. For each plane there is a set of dataRefs, each dataRef contains up to 40 byte data to be interpreted as a zero-terminated C string.

XPMP2 creates and maintains up to 63 sets of these dataRefs, starting at sim/multiplayer/position/plane1_tailnum and ending at sim/multiplayer/position/plane63_apt_to.

If you want to pubish information in your XPMP2-based plugin via these channels, then fill the appropriate field in the XPMP2::Aircraft::acInfoTexts structure.

sim/multiplayer/position/...	acInfoTexts.	Meaning
plane#_tailnum	tailNum	Tail number, registration
plane#_ICAO	icaoAcType	ICAO Aircraft type
plane#_manufacturer	manufacturer	Aircraft manufacturer, human readable
plane#_model	model	Aircraft model, human readable
plane#_ICAOairline	icaoAirline	ICAO airline/operator code
plane#_airline	airline	Airline/operator
plane#_flightnum	flightNum	Flight number
plane#_apt_from	aptFrom	Origin airport
plane#_apt_to	aptTo	Destination airport
plane#_cslModel	n/a	CSL Model name *)

*) _cslModel differs from the others in that it is not related to live flight information but to the way the plane is rendered by the XPMP2-based plugin. It returns the CSL model used as returned by XPMP2::Aircraft::GetModelName(), that is: last folder name plus model id.

Usage by 3rd-Party Plugins

A plugin that wants to use this data

• must once fetch references to all the up to 63 * 9 = 567 datarefs by
  • calling XPLMShareData,
  • optionally thereby registering a notification callback, and
  • calling XPLMFindDataRef;
• can then query current information via XPLMGetDatab as usual. Provide at least a 40 character buffer to be on the safe side.

Additional links

• Download page for “FSTrampFree” where the above shared dataRefs were originally suggested for implementation
• LiveTraffic issue #144, with which the functionality was originally added into the previous TwinFan branch of “libxplanemp”

This site is open source. Improve this page.