Exult 1.4 Updated
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.
just wanted to call to your attention in case you haven’t noticed that in the Exult forum, under U7 HD? there’s some serious discussions by the developers on revamping U7 graphics into higher resolutions. It’s exciting news to me…
Sounds interesting, though I think it would cost the game a lot of its original charm. I’m much more exited if I manage to get Exult work on my crappy little Windows PDA wich my employer “granted” me (I really hate that thing; my Moleskine-Notebook does far better work – but seing U7 on this thing could give it a 2nd chance at least as a gamemachine 😉 )
Thanks for alerting us to that, Quentin! I’ve added it to the list of news to post, and it should be up on the site in a couple of days. I’m usually able to get a couple of news posts up per day, and there are a few developments in the Ultima community that have happened in the past couple of weeks that still need to be reported.
But I will say this: HD graphics for Ultima 7 would be an interesting experiment. I’m somewhere between full enthusiasm and Toltec‘s caution on the issue…swapping out the graphical chunks shouldn’t interfere with the gameplay or story (if done properly). At the same time, the look is a part of the experience, and could be too easily overdone (e.g. expanding the colour palette).
That said, the discussion and sample work thus far presented has been excellent — the moongate samples look splendid.