Working with plugins

This section serves as a brief introduction how plugins are handled in IOLITE and how to install or compile IOLITE’s open-source plugins.

Loading plugins

The compiled plugin libraries (DLL or SO files) have to be placed in IOLITE’s root directory, right next to the executable.

In addition, the engine sources the plugins which should be loaded from the optional plugins.json file in the root directory. The file requires the following structure:

[
  {
    "name": "my_plugin",
    "filename": "MyPlugin"
  },
  {
    "name": "another_plugin",
    // ...
  }
]

The following members for configuring a plugin are available:

name (String)

A descriptive name for your plugin.

filename (String)

The filename of the library without the extension.

load_on_startup (Boolean, optional)

Set this to “false” to require loading the plugin manually.

checksum (Unsigned integer, optional, internal)

Used by the free version of IOLITE to whitelist certain plugins.

Installing the open-source plugins

The plugins documented in this chapter are available as open-source plugins in our public GitHub repository. The C/C++ sources of the plugins can be found here:

https://github.com/MissingDeadlines/iolite/tree/main/iolite_plugins

Even though compiling the plugins is straightforward, the plugins are also available as binaries for Windows and Linux, made available using GitHub releases. You can download a release matching your version of IOLITE here:

https://github.com/MissingDeadlines/iolite/releases

To load all the available, simply extract the contents of the windows or linux subdirectories in the plugins.zip file in the root directory of IOLITE, and you are good to go.

Important

There is no need to create the plugins.json file manually. Each release ships with a plugins.json file containing all the available open-source plugins.

Warning

The plugin libraries have to be placed right next to the executable. Placing them in a subdirectory will not work.

Compiling the sample and open-source plugins

Building the plugins requires a C++ compiler and a recent version of CMake.

The plugins can be built on any supported platform by either running build_plugins.bat/sh or by manually executing the following commands on the command line:

$ cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
$ cmake --build build --config Release