Set up plugin sdk
Following process will require Visual Studio 2022 or later with latest C++ language support installed on your machine. If you do not have it yet see Installing development environment (IDE).
! Plugin-SDK will need about 1 GB of disk space per each supported game. Make sure to locate it on disk drive with sufficient free space available.
Clone the https://github.com/DK22Pac/plugin-sdk.git repository to your machine.
If you do not know what it means, I warmly recommend you to learn about Version Control. It is standard practice in the software development world to use code management tools to keep track of changes in projects.
Plugin-SDK uses the most popular version control software: Git. Many people interact with it through a command console, but you might like to start with a user-friendly graphical interface, like for example Git Extensions or TortoiseGit.
! Git can be installed during Visual Studio installation by selecting the corresponding item in the installer.
If you are not feeling confident enough yet to use the Git you can then just download and extract the contents of the archive.
Plugin-SDK itself and later your own plugin projects will locate the PSDK and other needed components using environment variables configured in the operating system. This eliminates the need for specifying exact paths in your projects, meaning they can be placed or moved anywhere on your computer. It also guarantees that the project can be used on other people's machines (if you decide to make your plugin open sourced).
Launch installer-launcher.exe application located in the plugin-sdk folder:
! If you have problems running the application, make sure the .NET Framework 4.8 runtime is installed.
On first startup, the application will try to automatically detect directory paths to Plugin-SDK and installed GTA games.
You can then manually point out the missed locations using the ... button next to the path's text boxes. Not all paths are neccesary and can be specified later if needed.
! Auto-detection can be triggered again by clearing the contents of the Plugin-SDK path edition text box, applying the changes with Enter key, then restarting the installer application.
The Plugin-SDK and at least one game directory needs to be specified in order to proceed to the next step. More information about variables can be found here.
In this step there is not much to do, but click the button. The console window will pop up and after several seconds, the plugin.sln project file should be generated in Plugin-SDK directory, enabling you to proceed with the third step.
In order to later use in your projects, first Plugin-SDK libraries have to be built. Check target games you wish to develop plugins for on the list.
The public release of your plugins will be built using release configuration, but for development process it will be handy using debug configuration. It opens the way to debug code execution using Visual Studio's built-in debugger.
After selecting configurations, click the Visual Studio button below to start the building process. For each configuration, a console window will appear. Compilation of a single target can take up to a few minutes.
Having at least one plugin binary built finishes the Plugin-SDK setup process. More targets can be built later.