At this point could it be possible to enhance GSX so that it gets all the missing features with respect to AES, such as custom fingers that perfectly fit the airplane
This has been discussed many times on the forum: GSX main advantage over AES is the business model: you pay once, and you get all ALL airports supported at once, including default one and airports the original developer never had any intention to support in AES.
While is certainly possible, and already planned as a feature for the next major version of GSX, to improve jetways for default airports and surely FSDT (or Flightbeam, or any other developer that will eventually license our scripting engine) airports, adding animated jetways to 3rd party airports that don't have them, would require both working with the developers AND doing individual work to support each airport, which would require adopting the very same business model (pay for each airport) that we made obsolete with GSX.
In addition to that, the value of paying for an airport, has greatly devalued over the years, because:
- Before FSX was released, in the FS9 era, things like AES were basically impossible (well, we had them in some of our Cloud9 sceneries, but they were hard to do), and so paying for AES credits added a lot of value to an airport.
- After FSX was released, the value decreased, because FSX added animated jetways to all default airports, and some developers (well, we and a very few others) could use the SDK to add them to a scenery.
- After GSX was released, the value of those credits went down a lot (but not their price), because most users ended up paying, just to have those missing jetways on those 3rd party airports that still didn't had them, and used GSX for everything else.
- Today, three years after GSX was released and it's greatly established on the market, MANY 3rd party developers (all the GOOD ones, basically) have animated jetways as a standard feature in their sceneries, so the value of those same AES credits is now limited to having jetways that behaves better than default ones, basically. Same for docking systems: all the good scenery developers are able to create them without having to ask users to pay extra.
So, starting from scratch, I wonder if it would make much sense to enter in the market of credits, considering how devalued they are now. And suppose that LM will finally fix the jetways in one of the next versions, like we have been asking for a while....
and docking systems
This might be more feasible, since we are already planning to let users add our docking systems to any scenery (which means we or other users can also release some free configuration file in the sharing area), the support is already there, what's missing it's just an interactive user interface to place them.
