Plugins

Plugins extend xi4n’s core functionality, which is effectively to do nothing except maintain a connection to your chosen Insim, Outsim, Outgauge or LFS World Relay server.

Luckily xi4n both ships with some pre-made plugins and also has the capability for new plugins to be written and packaged up.

Using Plugins

To use one of the plugins included with xi4n (see the rest of this page for a list), just add an extra option in the plugins section of your config.yaml file, like so.

plugins:
    - alias: your-name-for-plugin
      path: plugin-name
      options:

To add a second plugin you’d do something like this:

plugins:
    - alias: your-name-for-plugin
      path: plugin-name
      options:
    - alias: your-name-for-plugin-2
      path: plugin-name-2
      options:

To active a plugin for a connection, you add the plugin’s alias to the list of plugins against the connection. For example, to add both your-plugin-name and your-plugin-name-2 to an Insim connection, talking to localhost, via TCP on port 29999, and outputs errors to the console, you should have a configuration that looks something like this:

- talk: insim
  insim:
    over: tcp
    host: localhost
    port: 29999
  use:
    - your-plugin-name
    - your-plugin-name-2
  log:
    - level: error
      type: console

Why all this alias bollocks? The main benefit is that you can have the same plugin running with 2 different sets of options, or you can have the same plugin running on multiple servers.

Core Plugins

There are a bunch of plugins that are shipped as part of xi4n and should be maintained as things progress. These plugins will not appear in your configuration directories, but should be available.

Each plugin will have it’s own set of options. You should look carefully at the appropriate page to make sure that you configure each correctly.

• busy: An anti-idler plugin.
• gauges: An outgauge plugin that draws a beatiful gauge on a webpage, representing whats happening on the car you’re driving (in real time).
• livemap2: A live tracker map, that displays on a web page, the live positions of racers (in real time).
• veto: An anti-vote plugin
• powered-by-text: A small example plugin, that shows how to display text when someone connects to a server.
• powered-by-buttons: A small example plugin, that shows how to display a button that auto-hides when someone connects to a server.
• state: A “meta” plugin that maintains a definition of the current state of LFS including players, connections and server state (weather, track, etc.) - many plugins will probably depend on this, typically you will most likely be asked to add the plugin, but do nothing else with it.
• slmbr: A joke Insim application, that rewards players for not moving.
• tv: A Work In Progress automatic TV director.

Other Plugins

In addition to the plugins that come with xi4n, you can also use plugins that are maintained by third parties. To use a third party plugin:

• Download the source for the plugin and place it into your-configuration-directory/plugins/plugin-name where plugin-name is the name of the plugin.
• Read the plugin documentation. It may require you to edit package.json and then run npm install in the configuration directory.
• Edit config.yaml and enable the plugin as above.
• Restart xi4n.

Writing Plugins

See Writing Plugins.