...we'll release later this year. We are working hard towards a beta of the AE.

We will have all features open. Shadows, sky, HDR, Landscape will all be open. You won't have access to the shader code but it will give you a lot more possibilities than the closed weather system.

Another big difference is that everything will work together so you can combine everything in one scene.

The list of new things in the new Quest3D is quite big:
- 64 bit
- New unified importing with new formats
- non power 2 textures and many new render buffer options
- SSOA
- Cascade shadow maps
- Landscape rendering
- Skylight and cloud simulation
- Hardware pointoven vertex animation
- Hardware instancing
- New greatly improved tone mapping
- New HLSL compiler <- (!)
- New application framework for shading and rendering
- 3d textures
- New texture formats
- New GUI functions
- New postprocessing
- New media playback and saving functions
This is not an official list so I probably forgot many things but I think there are many essential and powerful additions.