Thank you everyone for all your helpful comments and discussions on the weather issue. As I have pointed out, I am anxious to release SquawkBox 3 as soon as is humanly possible. So when someone speculated that perhaps having weather in SB3 wasn't necessary, it got me thinking. Unfortunately, I think it was mostly wishful thinking and I have decided that it's important that weather be present in SB3.

I don't anticipate this adding months to the schedule. It probably won't take that long at all actually if the experience of other SquawkBox authors is taken as a guide.

Thank you again for all the feedback. I read each and every message and I appreciate it.

December was a very productive month for SquawkBox development because I was on holidays the entire month. I am returning to work shortly and thought I would take this time to report on what remains.

The major items that are left are weather, FS2004 integration, auto-joining the multiplayer session, and the installer. The model set system still needs some rather intensive testing, the UI needs a few enhancements, and there are a myriad of other miscellaneous tasks as well. All of that will add up to cause development to stretch out longer than I'm sure anyone would like.

But as always, you can be assured that I'm doing everything I can to get SquawkBox 3 done and into your hands.

Happy new year to everyone!

I have added some information to the Plug-ins section of the site about the format of flight plan files in SquawkBox 3. This information should help you develop compatibility between your flight planning software and SquawkBox 3. As always please let me know if you have any questions.