And to think I was going to switch to Shiva3d... Awesome news JCL, I've been reeled back into the Acknex bandwagon!

great news
cant wait until the release

can't wait.....

this is gonna be the most boring wait ever...

...

TO be completely honest here;
It feels a bit like a rip-off, don't get me wrong I like my A7. But I see no reason to switch to A8 because of what is shown.

I'm not excited at all, and frankly it feels a bit like conitec is putting another version out just to try and be able to fight against the other free engines out there... I'm very disappointed. The only thing that would make me switch would be a completely new set of Tools that aren't as crappy to use as the toolset we have had since A4. Seriously, fix that...
I love Conitec, and have been supporting to use it the past 10 years (I got my school to work with it and buy licenses), but it feels like you are slipping this time...

Ofcourse i'll wait till A8 comes out and i can test it, but this was the first feeling and idea that came to mind.

regards,

So A8 will catch up to Unity a bit except for being multi-platform, the user-friendly editor and the upcoming high-end features of Unity 3? Well, it all will depend on the price policy I guess...

agreeing with helghast, i dont care much for the listed features, they dont seem 'upgrade' worthy, they seem like stuff that could be added to A7, paying for standard features and if you try to undertake a full game you'll see that the editors are the weak points, lack of material and lighting editors, all that.. dont see myself upgrading.. at all, unless i win it in a contest or something but looking at my game now and looking at the listed 'new' features, i dont see how the game benefits majorly... once they fix their damned vec_for_vertex bug that i mentioned in a report thread, then am fine [a thread that was closed btw, bug still not fixed]

how about better lights? WORKING radiosity, current implementaion is slow as.. heh, tsk, change the lighting model totally then.. then it'll seem worthy

Will the native HTTP support become available in the Commercial version of A8?

while you are at it also replace the direct input.(and allow stuff like ctrl+v)

wouldnt you say doing that is already somewhat, easy?

The speed increases alone are worth the update. I agree that the WED can be vastly improved though. I use Max for all my work, and a very tight integration with these programs would be the best.