Here's a news entry to fill out the rather sparse offerings here lately.

The last couple of weeks I have been working on the multiplayer aspect of SquawkBox: getting the program to join the mulitplayer session and getting the planes to show up in the world correctly.

Once this is in place, there will need to be some iteration on the interpolation techniques that are used in order to ensure smoother updates of plane positions. A working multiplayer subsystem will also allow testing of integration with CSL and Project AI model and texture sets.

Another hope is that SquawkBox will be able to initiate a multiplayer session automatically (I believe this is possible using the DirectPlay Lobby APIs). This will hide the details of multiplayer altogether and should make it possible for you to launch SquawkBox, connect to the network, and see planes moving around right away. All DirectPlay programming gurus are more than welcome to contact me about this!

There have been some intermittent problems accessing the discussion forum. The problem is caused by a database server outage at my ISP, but the issues will be resolved shortly.