The A8 engine is based on the MMO kernel that we started last year. The MMO was stopped, but the engine development was continued, resulting in A8. The beta version will be released next month. The final release version will be available in summer.

With A8 we'll change most external libraries that the engine was using since A4. Still, A8 is compatible to A7 and A6.40, so all A6 and A7 projects will normally still run under A8. The exception is physics - the dynamics is different and might require different parameters.

The hardware accelerated PhysX engine will replace the ODE engine. In almost all cases this will result in a better frame rate and greater stability of the physics simulation. Also, there will be a lot of new physics commands.

A8 can use the graphics hardware for accelerated bones rendering. This way, A8 can render bones animated actors about 3 times faster than A7, and 5 times faster than A6. Other entities, especially sprites, are rendered up to 30% faster than with A7, and two times faster than with A6.

Sprite instancing and new sprite types for dense vegetation will be supported.

A8 will support realtime shadowmapping.

The DirectPlay network library will be replaced by the Enet library. Previous network projects will still work as before.

Later in 2010, DirectSound will be replaced by OpenAL, allowing new sound effect commands.

A8 will support portal regions that can be controlled by doors and user switches, for increasing the rendering speed in indoor levels.

A published A8 acknex.dll will work with all executables generated with the same development system. This overcomes the problems with some commercial wrapper systems.

Through an overlay channel outside the DirectX area, arbitrary shaped windows will be possible.