Dude, this thread is from more than a year ago. The facts were right back then. I don’t know why someone dug this crap up.
And they did have to rebuild the engine. You can’t stick modern assets in to the game the way it was designed, and the rendering engine got deleted and made from scratch. If they didn’t need to make big changes to the engine the game wouldn’t be such a mess like it is right now. Nothing that they promised got done because the devs seemingly lacked the foresight of how hard it would be to rework this old sloppy coded game.