Major Exult Bug-Fix; Testers Wanted!
For those familiar with Exult, the “disappearing objects” bug needs little in the way of introduction. For those unfamiliar with Exult or the bug in question, it is an issue in the game whereby objects can, without warning, disappear from the player’s inventory game world. As in: entire buildings, loads of objects…basically everything but the chunks that comprise the terrain would just vanish. Britannia, but with widespread alien abductions of people and structures.
The bug proved to be something of a nemesis for the Exult team, as it was difficult to reproduce and almost impossible to isolate in the project’s source code. (You can read about the bug in this thread at the Exult forums if you’re hungry for more details.)
However, I was informed by Dominus that Dr. Code, one of the key developers on the Exult project, may have figured out the issue and solved it:
…Dr.Code…might have fixed the long standing disappearing objects bug in Exult. Might be worth a news item since we could use some help from people to play through U7 with current Exult snapshot.
The Exult 1.5 snapshots available for Windows and Apple’s OS X at both the Exult download page and the project entry here at the Ultima Codex have been updated with Dr. Code’s changes, and the Exult team (as can be seen above) are asking that anyone who has the time and interest to re-play Ultima 7 do so using the latest Exult snapshot. Watch for the disappearing items bug, and let them know if you encounter it…or, in turn, if you don’t.
Awesome! It’s just, in all the hundreds of times I’ve played Ultima VII using Exult, I don’t think I’ve ever actually encountered this bug.
I don’t think I have, either. That, or nothing of import went missing…
I had this bug happening to me last time while I was in Britain. There no longer was anything in Britain except moving NPCs. Whoopsie.
I was forced to go back to an earlier save Paws.
If that’s actually fixed, that is AWESOME!
Guess this means we can hope for a 1.5 in a not too long future :O
It just amazes me how hard these fans work on things like this; unofficial pages, recreations, mods, etc and never ask for a dime. Then you look at the huge companies making all kinds of money and want to charge us money for the slightest little add-on. Thanks to all of you, especially the Exult team! 7 was my favorite Ultima after 4.
Actually the bug kills objects all over the game world and AFIK not at all in the inventory. It seemingly strips down everything to the bare chunk.
As this was likely caused by not keeping track of the items produced by schedules (baker, tailor, smith..) the problem only manifested when our schedules got better ;(
Maybe you can correct this up there in the bug introduction.
Thanks for posting this so fast
Corrected. Thanks!
Thanks from me 🙂
To anyone wanting to help, even though wtf wrote it quite clearly, *DON’T* use the release version *BUT* the latest snapshot even though that is labeled “unstable”.
Wow, I remember this from many years ago. Well, what took them so long? 😛 (Just kidding – I’m a developer and I know how hard it can be sometimes =)) Great job guys!
Good work Exult team! Keep up the good work, you’ve made a world of Ultima fans happy for many years, and we know that bugs can be nasty. Now, hopefully we don’t encounter the Jonah Game-Patch Principle: For every problem addressed by a patch, two newer, harder to fix problems shall arise.