Ultima VII Part I - Exult v1.6 Released

To celebrate Ultima VIIs 28th anniversary the latest version of Exult (1.6) has been released.

17 April 2020

Exult 1.6 has been released to celebrate Ultima VII's 28th birthday!

Almost ten years after the version 1.4.9rc1, 16 years after the last stable version (v1.2) and 28 years after the official release of Ultima VII - The Black Gate (16 April 1992), we are finally ready to release a new version. With many developers busy with their real life and most having moved on, it took us this long. We have been busy squashing more of the inexplicable crashes but these changes will force us to stop supporting some ancient operating systems.
That's why we decided to release one last version of Exult, Exult Studio and Exult's tools for the old OS' before moving on with development. For really old Windows operating systems (95/98/ME/NT/2000) we prepared a legacy download.
So please grab the new version available on our download page.
The source tarball and the Debian package will be uploaded at a later date.
Please play with it and tell us of any problem you encounter using the forum or bug tracker.

A brief list of the most important changes in Exult since v1.4.9rc1:

• Shortcut bar with important shortcuts right on top of the screen (thanks Litchie)
• Switch to SDL2 - important for up to date OS'
• NxBR and HQ3x/HQ4x scalers
• Option to drop stacks of items without confirmation
• Some more combat options to make charmed combat more difficult
• Schedules got a work-over and are more closer to the original but not yet perfect
• NPCs using beds are sleeping better now
• Paperdoll support of wearing diapers
• Portable option for Windows
• Separate settings for fullscreen and windowed mode possible
• HighDPI mode available on macOS
• Better pathfinding when the party boards a barge
• Fixed most inexplicable crashes
• Serpent Isle Beta version works
• Cleaned up the code in many places and fixed many compiler warnings
• Tons of bugfixes

But we do have known issues:

• Some crashes due to some cached-out objects, we are working on this in another branch which will be the main snapshot after this release
• Antimagic rain caused by the cube generator is not dissipating as fast as it should
• Exult does not show the "you have beaten Ultima VII in n days" message
• Exult does not return to the game menu after beating the game (instead it quits)
• The BG intro does not have the proper sound effects
• Fire Elementals cannot walk across lava
• Some schedules need more detailed love
• Several bugs that need more in-depth looking at but no plot-stopping bugs
• When you disable "Gumps pause game", certain events might only happen after you close all gumps