Exult v1.4.9 Release Candidate 1 Released

The team behind the excellent Exult engine (you know, the one that allows us to play Ultima VII and all of its addons on modern machines) has recently released their first v1.4.9 release candidate, which looks surprisingly ambitious based on the patch notes they’ve made available. Better playability, improved compatibility, an in-game journal, and more is on tap in this release:

It took us over six years, but with DNF seemingly getting ready to be released after all, we had to do something. To prepare for a full release, we have created a first Release Candidate, available on our download page. Please play with it and tell us of any problem you encounter using the forum or bug tracker.

If you have followed the news this list is likely already familiar to you, but we did a lot with Exult in the years since 1.2:

‘¢ Compatible with the stricter permissions of Windows Vista and Windows 7
‘¢ Rewrite of the Graphics system to allow switching to full screen on modern systems
‘¢ Better integration into Mac OS X with default location for the supported games
‘¢ Smooth scrolling (disabled by default, though)
‘¢ Aspect correction is now supported
‘¢ More data from the original has been decoded and thus improved gameplay and combat
‘¢ In-game Notebook with support for automatic notes (notes created by usecode)
‘¢ Integrated Pentagram’s audio system which means support for real Roland MT-32 device, Roland MT-32 emulation and FluidSynth
‘¢ Removed dependency of the audio system on SDL_Mixer
‘¢ New shapes for the paperdolls
‘¢ Tons of bugfixes

There have been many changes to Exult Studio and our support for mods as well:

‘¢ Multi-map support for new games
‘¢ Moved hard-coded information to datafiles
‘¢ Increased limits on resource sizes (shapes, frames, etc)
‘¢ Greatly improved compiler tools to ease new game development
‘¢ Tons of work on our map editor Exult Studio and the ability to develop new games and mods

Worth mentioning is that our team member Marzo has developed two mods, which can be downloaded separately:

‘¢ Keyring for BG which adds a large quest to obtain a SI-style keyring, as well as a lot of other enhancements such as meditating in the shrines and viewing the Codex
‘¢ SIfixes for SI which corrects many mistakes in the game, for example you can now cure Cantra when you play with this mod

Thanks, RPGWatch.