The new engine, which is nothing else than DX7 upgradet to DX9, was announced one year ago. Many people seem to think that the developer team around game director Means still have their hands in the pants and whistle on whistles all day long. But they succeeded vey well during this year and right now combine the new engine elements with the old ones. This is just a little update on the few news that come around the forums and twitter.
Last week the new sky and lighting was implemented, how you can see on these official screenshots. 1 | 2
Smart followers of the footprints to the new engine already know that even the new grass was implemented some time ago and Mean uploaded a rough-cut video of the new engine with the amazing looking new grass on his unknown youtube channel.
Even the work on the new character faces seem to be completed soon, like this new picture of new race heads tell us. Its nice to see some faces in high quality render instead of watching in the low-pixel facials, which the game has for years. Cant wait to get my eyes on the complete make-over of the old character models.
Anarchy Online belongs to the first great MMOs out there for more than 9 years now and features a sci-fi setting instead of boring elves vs. orcs fantasy stories. I spend 5 years of my life playing the game and it was the greatest experience I ever had inside an Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. Its about time to see the final product and to reactivate my account to continue having fun with my beloved MMO. Right now I am playing the FreeMMO Runes of Magic, which is… nothing else than a very bad World of Warcraft clone that bores me right now.
A3D's Let's Plays 
If AO gets the AoC engine – then we will see a mass exodus of players coming back to this game. I certainly hope Funcom has some common sense and do not release it with old-code clunky engine once more.