X-Plane 10 Steam with debugger attached

Question

I'm trying to develop a plugin right now, and I would love to start X-Plane with the debugger attached so I don't have to do printf() debugging like a caveman. However, the biggest issue with that is that I have the steam version of X-Plane and that I can't launch the X-Plane exe directly because it will complain about not being launched via Steam. Now I know that I can launch X-Plane via the Steam.exe, however, that doesn't give me my debugger attached to X-Plane and I could of course attach the debugger afterwards to X-Plane but by then it's already done loading pretty much everything.

Any idea how I can achieve what I want without buying X-Plane again just to get a non Steam version?

Answer 1

Hi,

You have four options here:

1. Use the X-Plane demo from Laminar Research - its capabilities are limited but it launches normally.

2. Buy the LR global edition of X-Plane.

3. Install your plugin in an aircraft - the plugin will be loaded when the aircraft is loaded; you can already be attached.

4. Structure your plugin to defer its initialization to later in execution - if you can develop your init code first and then defer most execution, you can use Steam and attach later.

It might be possible to combine options 1 & 4.

Comments

I didn't think about 1, that actually seems like a really good idea! I actually found yet another method in the meantime, schedule a flight loop source that reloads all plugins, that way I can completely attach everything I need. It's super clumsy though.

 

#1 is definitely the best option I think, because quite frankly I'm lazy and I would love it if my IDE could just automatically attach the debugger for me instead of doing it manually, so it's easiest if I can point the IDE to the x-plane.exe directly. I guess eventually I'll bite the bullet and buy X-Plane again since I'll need joysticks for longer than 15 minutes at some point (and by need I mean, I would rather gauge my eyes out than play X-Plane with a keyboard)