There’s been a fair bit of talk and buzz about Exult lately, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that Exult development has really picked up lately.  Some of the different platforms have really gotten some well-needed attention lately which has also been something of a shot in the arm to both the engine development and the community as a whole.

Let me segue from the article of discussion for just a moment.  As WTF Dragon has posted previously, he has a few more editors (one of which being myself) whom are going to be posting articles here to keep the content coming, and a few more ears to the ground for movement, as it were.  For those of you not familiar with my name, I’m Peter M Dodge, also known by Wizardry Dragon.  I am the Lead Designer of the Feudal Lands and have worked with Exult for years and years now.  I hope to post news on both Exult and TFL, and some general Ultima news as well.  I have been playing with the idea of a feature serial of some sort but I’ll toss that at WTF Dragon first and see if it sticks before making any promises here.

With that out the way let’s regress to the topic on hand: Exult.

One of the platforms that has gotten this attention is the MacOS distribution, which has finally gotten properly packaged.  This meant a lot of compilation work and a lot of bug fixes as well as accomodations for the nuances of the Mac platform, a lot of which has finally gotten stamped out and done finally.  It had mostly been put off – but now it has been taken care of!

The windows distribution in the meantime got a lot of updating.  Many bugs related to OpenGL were fixed, and that niggling Windows Vista/7 file paths bug got fixed so that you don’t need to be an administrator to play!  A much needed change to be certain.

So, dear reader, you are most certainly wondering what this means in the perspective of Exult’s future development.  On that topic I can speculate with an informed opinion, though until it does indeed occur it is just that, speculation.  Ah, in any event – there is one major encompassing idea that seems to have taken to the Exult team, or Marzo at least: taking the knowledge that has been gained through the many, many years Exult has been undergoing development, and take the insights they have gained in its development to better rebuild the engine.  The graphics engine has been of particular interest, as Marzo has noted that many of his OpenGL fixes have opened his eyes to the fact that really the whole thing just needs rewritten to actually fix some of the issues, and talk has been floated of using the Pentagram graphics engine.

We shall see, I suppose, but good things lie in wait for Exult, methinks!

The bleeding-edge version of Exult — the Ultima 7 engine for more operating systems and platforms than one cares to list — has been updated as of October 9th. Exult Tools and Exult Studio have similarly been updated, and all can be downloaded from the project website.

Or from the project entry here at Aiera.

There’s still no new news posted on the project’s main website, but Exult — the engine that enables Ultima 7 (both parts: The Black Gate and Serpent Isle) to run on virtually every OS imaginable — has been updated. Exult 1.4, the “unstable, beta” build of the engine, was updated earlier this month, as were Exult Studio and Exult Tools.

Major changes in this release include correction of a few problems associated with creating a new game from within Exult Studio, a code change to prevent dead NPCs from taking additional damage, a tweak to the proximity-based wake-up feature of NPCs, and a few other code corrections.

I have added downloads for all three updated programs, plus an updated copy of the Exult source code, to the project entry.

Well, it’s been a little while since I posted an update pertaining to Ultima projects, and I see that Petrell and Dino over at Dino’s Ultima Page have uncovered several juicy morsels of news. To wit:

EUO

This Ultima-like project reached its fifth year just recently, and to celebrate the occasion they threw a number of bonuses and extra stuff into the game — experience bonuses, prizes & giveaways, DM-hosted events, special in-game drinks (eggnog, for example), and even a few new bosses.

Also, a “Newbie Island” tutorial map has been added to the game to help new players ease in.

Ultima 6 Project

A new press release from this promising-looking remake of Ultima 6 has been released at RPGWatch. It has some details about new cities and places in the pending fifth milestone release (Nicodemus’ keep, for example), and also informs us that the team is always in need of world builders, 3D modelers, artists, and musicians.

So, O Reader, if you fall into any of those categories, you might want to swing by the Ultima 6 Project website and drop someone a line.

Additionally, project developer Nicodemus has posted another update to his worldbuilding Dev Diary with some cool new screenshots of his work (Jhelom and Skara Brae).

Ultima: Iris

A new build — build 2010 — of this 3D client for Ultima Online has been released. It can be downloaded from the project’s homepage, or via the project entry here at Aiera.

xu4

A new snapshot of the Mac version of this Ultima 4 remake is available for download either through the project website or via the project entry here at Aiera. A new Windows snapshot is also available.

Ultima V for TI Calculators

Ranman has posted additional news about his project that has ported Ultima 5 to the Texas Instruments calculator. He lets us know, firstly, about some special item capabilities that he as implemented. Secondly, he talks about killing NPCs, lock picking, and guard behaviour — rather a “law and order” sort of post.

The project is still in beta testing.

I also took a bit of a wander around the Ultima community myself, and noticed a few other odds and ends that the Reader might be interested in.

Savage Empire for Exult

Scythifuge is always looking for people to help out with his ambitious goal of porting the Savage Empire storyline into Exult.

Exult

Speaking of Exult, I notice that the Windows snapshot of Exult 1.4 has been updated recently (April 14th), as have the snapshots for Exult Tools and Exult Studio. These can be downloaded from the project website, and I have added them to the project entry here at Aiera.

Project Britannia

I noticed that the britannia_art.dsres and britannia_logic.dsres resource files for this Ultima world framework were updated at the beginning of April. Changes since the previous revision include the addition of a new lockpick texture, a ferry, and two new light textures, as well as changes to melee attack logic, the lockpick’s shape, and a bunch of other things.

The updated files can be downloaded from the Project Britannia site, or via the project entry here at Aiera.

Also, I’ve made a few minor changes to the site here. For starters, I have added a module to the site sidebar to track the ten most downloaded files in the last 30 days. Initially, I wasn’t going to clear the statistics for the download manager with any sort of frequency, but after a bunch of Ultima 9-related downloads surged ahead (in some cases, to over 3,000 downloads!), it seemed reasonable to give some of the other files a chance to make the top spot.

So it’s there, and I won’t be putting a “top five” list onto news posts anymore.

And of course, there’s the gallery and Ultima art repository. I do encourage any interested users to register a user account there and begin uploading any Ultima-related art they can find so that it can be preserved for posterity. This includes scans of art from the manuals, which won’t be around forever.

Oh, and I’ve added another countdown to the sidebar. Only 190 days (roughly — could change in either direction) until the Dragoness and I welcome our little one into the world!