LTAPI

API to access LiveTraffic's aircraft information. Data transfer from LiveTraffic to your plugin is by dataRefs in a fast, efficient way: LiveTraffic copies data of several planes combined into defined structures. LTAPI handles all that in the background and provides you with an array of aircraft information with numerical info like position, heading, speed and textual info like type, registration, call sign, flight number.

LTAPI files and Documentation

You only need to include 2 files into your own projects:

• LTAPI.cpp
• LTAPI.h

Both files include lots of comments in Doxygen style as documentation. The generated Doxygen documentation is available in docs/html/index.html or on GitHub pages.

Example Plugin Implementation

The Example folder includes an example X-Plane plugin (based on the Hello World plugin), which demonstrates the most simplistic usage as well as an enhanced way of using the API by subclassing the provided LTAPIAircraft class.

The plugin just opens two windows and shows information about LiveTraffic's aircrafts as text.

Simple Example

...starts at around line 195 of LTAPIExample.xpp. Look for MARK: LTAPI Simple Example. It just

• uses a static LTAPIConnect object,
• calls its function UpdateAcList() every second via a flight loop callback, and
• loops the resulting map of aircrafts for display of textual information in the output window.

Enhanced Example

...starts at around line 269 of LTAPIExample.xpp. Look for MARK: LTAPI Enhanced Example. This demonstrates how to use LTAPIAircraft as a base class for some own class. Often, you have your own way of representing aircrafts in your app already. You can add LTAPIAircraft as a base class and then don't need to copy information back and forth but have access to it right from within your own class.

For this to work you

• need to subclass LTAPIAircraft,
• may want to do init/cleanup work in the constructor and destructor,
• may want to override virtual bool updateAircraft() so that you can do some own work whenever a/c information changes,
• must provide a callback for creating new empty objects when LTAPIConnect::UpdateAcList() finds a new aircraft in the sky.
• most likely want to handle the list of removed aircrafts (before they are destroyed) similar to what LoopCBUpdateAcListEnhanced does.

All the rest of the code deals with the example's functionality, which is:

• The class EnhAircraft also manages the line number in the output display, i.e. once it found a line it stays there. Also allows to show text "---removed---" for some time when a/c was removed.
• Each line provides more information as the simple example and renders that info in fairly well aligned columns.

Building the Example

IDEs

• Mac: Open the XCode project LTAPI.xcodeproj. There might be paths you way want to check: In the Build Settings there is a user-defined setting XPLANE11_ROOT pointing to the root folder of your X-Plane 11 installation. If that is set correctly then the resulting plugin is installed there correctly in the plugins folder.
• Windows: Open the Visual Studio solution LTAPI.sln. Also here you might need to check directories. There is a copy command to my X-Plane installation in the Post Build Event.

Docker

As I don't have a Linux environment myself I provide a Docker environment to build the Linux version as well as the Windows and the Mac version based on a CMakeList. I have not tested the resulting Linux binary.

• You need Docker installed. Then, with the Docker app running:
• cd Example/docker
• make

You will find the resulting binaries as build-<platform>/<platform>_x64/LTAPIExample.xpl.

Github Actions

The LTAPI Example builds on Github, see .github/workflows/build.yml.

Installation of the Example

The LTAPI Example plugin is just one small binary file to be installed like any other X-Plane plugin under <X-Plane>/Resources/plugins. For all 3 platforms you end up with the following folder and file structure:

<X-Plane>/Resources/plugins/
    LTAPIExample/
        lin_x64/
            LTAPIExample.xpl
        mac_x64/
            LTAPIExample.xpl
        win_x64/
            LTAPIExample.xpl

What it looks like

This is a screenshot taken from the Example plugin included in this project: