Correct me if Im wrong but does it not just entail you giving permission to Aerosoft and access to the program for the work to be carried out at their end in order to get the sceneries to work with AES and bring these airports to life.??
No, permission it's not enough. It might work for some sceneries, but not all of them.
Some sceneries (like KLAX) were made in a way that the main buildings and the jetways were modeled as a single piece, which has a positive impact on fps (that's why KLAX is faster than EHAM, that's why EHAM had AES), but would require us to go back at modeling of the original KLAX and separate the objects, which is something we were not willing to do for several reasons: one because this would mean lowering the fps even for users *not* using AES OR, to the very least, to distribute and mantain two different separate set of files, which still is a burden. And, of course, there would be the actual work involved that someone has to do and, it couldn't be economically justfied ONLY with the supposed increased of sales given by AES, which is not very significant, I have to say.
We decided to support AES with FSDT, mostly as a curtesy to our users, not because we see any particular increase of sales because of it.
It certainly doesn't *hurt* sales having it, that's why we support it for FSDT, since it doesn't cost anything to do the sceney in a certain way, if this is taken into consideration from the START. But the increase in sales that can be attributed to AES is so small, that it simply can't justify going back to a scenery that was developed long ago, before AES came out, and retro-fit it doing actual modeling work on it.
With not so much additional work (in case of KLAX), we could update the scenery with the new runways, port it to FSX, and have a new product, with AES included.
