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.AAI files:
The ".aai" files that accompany the cockpit walls, steering wheel and finder .raw files are "Anti-Alias Information" files, which dynamically smooth the edge pixels of those cockpit elements.
 Looking at the above picture of the finder you can see that the green arrow (triangle), which cannot use an .aai, does not have any edge smoothing of any kind, the pixels are jagged like stair steps. The green dot element does not use an .aai either, but it does have some built in attempts at smoothing by way of darker colored pixels at the edges, shown outlined in red. The blue ring however has been dynamically smoothed with an anti-alias information file. The core of the ring itself is nothing more than a solid blue ring with hard edges just like the green arrow, but the .aai that was generated for it smoothes those edges and dynamically blends it with whatever color is in the background. Outlined in red you can see the lighter shades of blue that blend it with the daytime sky, and if the ring or the background were another color the blending pixels would dynamically change to match them. While the effect of these .aai files is a clever one it appears to work exclusively on the cockpit wall panels, the cockpit steering wheel and the finder ring. It does not work on the shifter light, the finder arrow and dot, nor on trees used in a track, though if it could it would be very nice effect. Perhaps the effect is too processor intensive to use on a large scale. All new cockpit wall panels, cockpit steering wheels and the finder ring MUST have new .aai files generated for them! TRI's command line utility AARaw.exe (originally distributed with their Fly! editor) "generates anti-aliased edge files for cockpit images". It apparently finds all jagged edges in an image that are adjacent to any pure black areas on the image (palette value zero) and softens the transition via an overlay graphic, creating an "anti-aliased" soft edge. This makes the edges blend well with the layer rendered below it (steering wheel on cockpit, finder on background, etc.). Thus your raw images can and should have jagged pixel edges where they border the pure black (transparent) areas, and the generated AAI will dynamically provide the edge buffer.
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