The video was prepared for the press tour attending a press tour for Age of Conan here in Oslo on Friday. I admit I wasn't expecting them to get it up so fast but yes, it is official and it is footage from the alpha version of the new rendering engine.

One slight correction is that I believe some of the sites have credited as being the Conan engine, which isn't the case, the updates to the new anarchy engine are being developed independently and its not the same engine tech as we have said before the engine for Conan isn't backwards compatible with the AO engine.

It is looking fantastic and the guys here are doing a great job on it so we wanted people to be able to see the progress so far

IMO, gdyby Blizzard zrobił taki engine w WoW teraz, to bym się poszczał.

How long have you been working on this new engine?

We have been working on the engine for some time in terms of research and preliminary work, probably close to a year already (as we have to also focus on the live product as well), but we are now in full production with it and dedicated resource assigned to it.


Do you have a timeframe for release?

We are currently close to what we think is a good alpha version internally and our QA teams will soon be going over it. This version is feature complete as it were, but without the gfx effects incorporated, as all of the effects in the game need to be converted to work in the new engine. That is the next phase of development that we hope to complete over the coming months. We haven’t set a firm release window yet as with an update like this a lot of testing is required. We hope to start comprehensive beta testing sometime in the late summer and then we will assess when we might look to release it to our live servers. The team is definitely aiming for later this year.

The new engine is coming along well. We are slowly being able to strip out the work done by the old engine and soon all basic/core functions will be provided by the new engine entirely. The removal of the old engine means a complete removal of the old effects system...and the re-creation/improvement of all the effects in game. This is of course a very significant amount of pure time consuming work. At the same time work will be done to improve the look of the game where possible...things like character model alterations, new trees etc are all adding to the time required to get this done...and get this done right. We really want to take our time with this to make sure it lives up to all of our expectations. Our current goal is "Summer 2009". I'd like to promise it will be ready...but all I can really promise is that I will not release it until I am certain it looks amazing and is well optimized to ensure excellent performance on the vast majority of systems.

Skoro głupi Funcom zrobił patcha z nowym enginem, to dlaczego Blizzard tego nie robi? nie rozumiem kompletnie tego... przecież ponad 50% graczy ma już maszynki do uciągnięcia AoC.