¬ SQUAWKBOX 4 RELEASED
24 AUG
Finally, after months of work, SquawkBox 4 has been officially released for download. The new version support fully integrated Microsoft FSX online networking and is easier than ever to use. SB4 has been tested for the last 11 days by VATSIM and pilots. The new program, 26MB in size, also works with FS2004 and is now available to download from http://squawkbox.ca/news/

 ¬ FSX, 2 YEARS ON...
07 JULY
FSX will have been with us for 2 years this Fall. When Microsoft first talked about the upcoming upgrade to the game, the flight simulation community, and BVAir, were all very excited. Yet, two years on, the excitement has long gone, and I, like many of our pilots, am disappointed with the offering from FSX. Every week, we get emails from our registered pilots and visitors asking us to keep FS2004 support going. We are, and we will!

Whilst FSX has taken the visuals and realism to the next level, it still has many flaws. One of them being the poor performance of the simulator in its maximum settings. Even with the latest PC equipment, the game struggles with traffic and rendering. We approached Microsoft a while back about this, and we were promised that SP1 of Windows Vista would help. It did, but I'm afraid, too little, too late. The development of third party software and freeware for FSX has also been amazingly slow, when compared to FS2002 and FS2004 releases. To date, some of BVAir.com fleet is still unavailable for FSX due to the lack of developers working on the simulator.

We know that Microsoft is already working on the next version of Flight Simulator, let us hope this upgrade will be worth the wait! In the meantime, rest assure that we will maintain our FS2004 support, as well as looking for opportunities to develop our FSX offering further.

- Alan Marchal
BVAir.com Founder