Sample Plugins

The easiest way to build a plugin is to start with an existing example. There are three places where you can find plugin samples:

1. The samples folder in the SDK has a number of plugin samples.

2. The All Sample Projects package in the Download tab has a plugins folder with some small samples. You can also find their source code here: https://github.com/OurMachinery/sample-projects

3. You can create a new plugin with the menu command File > New Plugin. This will create a new .c file for the plugin together with some helper files for compiling it. (Follow this guide)

The distribution already comes with pre-built .dlls for the sample plugins, such as bin/plugins/tm_pong_tab.dll. You can see this plugin in action by selecting Tab > Pong in the editor to open up its tab:

Table of Content

• What are the build Requirements
• Build the sample plugin
• Sample Plugins:

What are the build Requirements

To build plugins you need three things:

1. You need to have Visual Studio 2019 installed including the MS C++ Build Tools on your computer. Note that the Community Edition works fine. (Or clang and the build essentials on Linux)
2. You need to set the TM_SDK_DIR environment variable to the path of the SDK package that you installed on your computer. When you compile a plugin, it looks for The Machinery headers in the %TM_SDK_DIR%/headers folder.
3. You need the tmbuild.exe from the SDK package. tmbuild.exe does all the steps needed to compile the plugin. Put it in your PATH or copy it to your plugin folder so that you can run it easily from the command line.

Build the sample plugin

To compile a plugin, simply open a command prompt in the plugin folder and run the tmbuild.exe executable:

sample-projects/plugins/custom_tab> %TM_SDK_DIR%/bin/tmbuild.exe
​~~~ cmd output
Installing 7za.exe...
Installing premake-5.0.0-alpha14-windows...
Building configurations...
Running action 'vs2019'...
Generated custom_tab.sln...
Generated build/custom_tab/custom_tab.vcxproj...
Done (133ms).
Microsoft (R) Build Engine version 16.4.0+e901037fe for .NET Framework
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

  custom_tab.c
  custom_tab.vcxproj -> C:\work\themachinery\build\bin\plugins\tm_custom_tab.dll

-----------------------------
tmbuild completed in: 23.471 s

tmbuild.exe will perform the following steps to build your executable:

1. Create a libs folder and download premake5 into it. (You can set the TM_LIB_DIR environment variable to use a shared libs directory for all your projects.)
2. Run premake5 to create a Visual Studio project from the premake5.lua script.
3. Build the Visual Studio project to build the plugin.

Note: You can learn more about tmbuild in its own section.

Sample Plugins: