Orbiter Claude Devkit 2026-07-06

A complete toolkit for developing Orbiter vessels, plugins, virtual cockpits, and city skylines using Claude Code (or any AI coding assistant) as your engineering partner.

This is everything I learned the hard way building real Orbiter projects — documented, organized, and packaged so you don't repeat the same mistakes.

What's in the box

12 guide docs covering the full development lifecycle:

• Dev environment setup (VS2022, CMake, ATL, DirectX SDK)
• Building Orbiter from source (and when NOT to modify the engine)
• Plugin/MFD development with a complete working example
• Native C++ vessel from scratch — thrusters, animations, XRSound, save/load
• Porting Lua ScriptVessels to native C++ (every callback mapped)
• Virtual cockpit development — dynamic text overlays, clickable instruments, spherical click areas, the grid discovery technique
• D3D9Client internals — mipmap behavior, PANEL_MAP blit chain, shader paths, the oapiCreateSurface fix
• API quick reference with every common gotcha documented

10 Python tools:

• Mesh UV density analyzer — find visible texture regions for VC overlays
• Overlay mesh generator (MSHX1 format)
• DXT1 placeholder DDS generator
• VC instrument position finder (generates ready-to-paste C++ registration code)
• Full city skyline pipeline — OSM PBF → Orbiter BASE-V2.0 configs with proper vertex budgeting and texture distribution (generated Manhattan-style skylines for Tokyo, Dubai, London, Paris, Barcelona, Hong Kong, Chicago)

Project templates:

• Minimal MFD plugin (CMake + C++, compiles and runs)
• Minimal native C++ vessel (CMake + C++, all entry points stubbed)

Claude Code setup scripts (Windows/Mac/Linux):

• One-click installers that check Node.js and install Claude Code via npm
• DeepSeek launcher scripts — just paste your API key and run (DeepSeek provides an Anthropic-compatible API, works natively with Claude Code at ~$0.14/M input tokens)
• User-friendly setup guide with screenshots