How do we know whether it involves a new engine or not? Like, recently I read that apparently the engine doesn't support dynamic track/ambient temps either. Is it true? Is it not? I personally have no way to tell. What about weather as in clouds and rain? Does it require multiple light sources? Or does it require physics calculations that you can't add to the engine? Again, I have no way to find out on my own.
I think there is a lot of confusion about engines. AFAIK RRE is running the same physics engine as Rfactor (isimotor) but the graphics are handled via RendR in a DX9 environment. As per this interview, apparently rain and time transition are possible and those are not DX9 limitations either, like the multithread issue is. http://www.virtualr.net/raceroom-racing-experience-–-diego-sartori-qa-2 Do you support different times of day? Weather? The game engine does support different times of day and it has native support for rain. For RaceRoom Racing Experience we start off with races during daylight hours and no rain.
I doubt multithread issue is a DX9 limitation. Like I mentioned in another discussion, Borderlands 2 is also a DX9 app but it can use multiple cores.
Well, there is: look at the sector3 homepage. For a very long time there are jobs on offer (namely "Network Programmer", "C++ Programmer", "C# Backend Programmer"). And those jobs are still not taken. So the excuse is simple: there is no person in the team who could do it. Sad but true.