I have the A6 Comm. and now iam thinking about to buy the Pro Version , but if there come a A7 , i better wait for that. So my Question is , will there come a A7 version ? and if so when will it come ?

Anyone knows that ?

thx ..

Shinobi ..

My guess would be that A7 is still coming (otherwise it is unlikely that Doug and Marco would still be going to work ). As far as when - that hasn't been announced, but most software operates on a 2 to 3 year cycle between major versions (unless you are dealing with 3DS Max which seems to be on a 10 month cycle now ). That means that the likely earliest date we will be hearing about an A7 will be Summer of 2005 - though I would guess early 2006 myself.

Hope it will come and fast
what do you think will be new in A7 ? will it be like the HL2 Engine
would like to know the major things that will be new. Couse maybe it will be enough for me to buy A6 Pro . But i am still learning and i am building my first game (alpha 0.8 version) so maybe i didnt need to buy the pro.
otherwise i dont like to be limited

I hear they will put a "Read my mind and make the Game button" in the Pro version.

It is way too early to really speculate on what the new features will be, but it is certain to cause half the forum to bitch about having to pay for the upgrade, another half to bitch about no real new features being added, and a third half to silently purchase A7 without so much as a peep.

BTW - what is missing from A6 to keep it from being like Source right now? Mostly a bit of polish and professionalism from the end users. Anywho - it will come when it comes and not a second before.

My thoughts on engine technology and what might happen with A7.. remember this is total speculation on my part so dont take it too seriously. First off I think A6 has a good while to go yet and many improvements will be made. When it comes time for A7, they may decide to totally redo the terrain/outdoor part of the engine, adding in a much more integrated terrain editor, prolly in WED instead of in MED. Also, speaking of WED, it think that's going to change a lot.. i would imagine support for higher-order surfaces, and support for real-time viewports.. meaning the viewport will look pretty much like it will in the game, real-time lighting depending on whether they fully embrace some kind of new lighting model. There could be just an open ended material system as there is now, or there may be more integral support for a particluar lighting system, perhaps some kind of spherical lighting model and High Dynamic Range. Again you can't always use the same lighting system for everything usually.. FarCry is an excellent example of a multi-lighting-model system, using diffuse lighting on terrains, and bump+specular on indoors.. they also use lightmapping in FarCry and HL2, so i doubt A7 will totally abandon lightmapping the way Doom3 did. I would expect also more types of dynamic shadows, including projected shadow maps and soft shadowing. Anyway this is my speculation so who knows what really will happen.

That would be nice if they do that .

what i realy want is maybe a 3ds Importer for Med or to remove mdl format and use something that the most 3d Apps uses maybe 3ds. I am using 3ds Max and cant do without it but i dont have a mdl7 export plugin for it , so i cant make models with Bones

Dont worry about it. Using the A9 SDK the rest of us outside the US can make a plugin that uses "Open Mind" which I hear is not available in the US.

my speculations:

6.4 will be the last a6 update. i hope/guess octrees, the new terrain/model features and the light management will make it into that final update.

the main features of a7 at the beginning of its life cycle will be lite-c and a new much more modern wed interface. wed will use the engine for displaying the 3d view and maybe incorporate the announced interactive template editing. later a7 will get stuff like weighted bones, a shader editor, improved stencil shadows with multipass rendering like in doom3, depth map shadows as an alternative to stencil shadows, the planned game starter,...