Making a Plugin

The Gideros plugin system is used primarily to extend the functionality of the Gideros API, for example by writing a plugin that provides Lua bindings to an existing native library. Although Gideros is open source, the plugin system keeps the size of the core lean and mean by allowing users to choose which plugins to export with which project. Here we'll walk through the process of creating a plugin, hopefully explaining the important bits along the way.

To start writing a plugin you need to first get your Gideros native development environment set up, by following Compiling Gideros Source. You can start off with just the Desktop target, so only really need Qt and Git (and MSYS2 on Windows). But following through the instructions there will allow you to create and build plugins for all Gideros export targets.

The .gplugin file

You can see in the gideros/plugins directory that there is a name_of_plugin.gplugin file for each (actually not all, but that's not important just now) plugin. This is an XML file that defines which platforms the plugin supports and what should be done with plugin files when exporting a project to the relevant target. It's important to note that Gideros makes use of template projects for exporting and you can see there are append/by sections which find/replace relevant parts of the template.

<plugin
  name="Pathfinder"
  description="High performance 2D pathfinding."
>