Passing The Torch

We've gone live with the new XSB website. It's not much to look at - basically we switched from some lousy HTML I hacked out five years ago to Drupal, so that Wade could update content without me having to push it to the site.

This marks a transition to Wade being the lead for XSquawkBox - he'll be building and posting releases. This is a logical streamlining; he has been the driver for features recently, while I haven't had time to do much. He has ideas on how to improve XSB's user experience, so I don't want to hold him up.

I haven't had much time for XSquawkBox but there is one future effort that I hope to be involved with over the coming years: development of a next-generation CSL library format and rendering engine. XSquawkBox is a strictly VATSIM plugin, and will remain that way. But the multiplayer rendering code is open source and can remain that way, allowing all multiplayer clients to leverage the same set of art assets. I think it is very important to have a unified standard for the next X-Plane CSL spec so that everyone can pull in the same direction in generating higher quality CSLs.