Unofficial development foundation, tooling, reference guidance and reusable conventions for modern OpenCPN plugins.
This is an independent community development project. It is not an official OpenCPN project and does not imply IMO, IEC, IHO, ECDIS or type-approval compliance.
The DevKit is intended to provide a shared, reviewable basis for AI-assisted and conventional OpenCPN plugin development. It will collect:
- OpenCPN plugin architecture and API guidance;
- Windows/MSVC/CMake build conventions;
- plugin packaging, metadata and distribution workflow;
- Git, issue, branch and pull-request conventions;
- maritime HMI and navigation-display design principles;
- DAY / DUSK / NIGHT-aware design-system rules;
- reusable plugin structure and reference implementation patterns;
- CI and validation guidance;
- instructions for coding agents such as Codex.
OpenCPN source code, the current OpenCPN developer documentation, the OpenCPN plugin catalog/project and applicable upstream API headers remain authoritative for OpenCPN behavior. Maritime standards may be used as design references, but this DevKit must clearly distinguish design guidance from regulatory or type-approval claims.
Initial bootstrap. The detailed playbook and reusable template will be developed through GitHub issues and reviewed pull requests.