Why there isn't a final version of Exult yet
The Exult Team posted a news update a few days ago, and in the hustle and bustle of traveling home I completely forgot that they had done so. Fortunately, Petrell reminded me, so for those of you who don’t check the Exult website regularly, here’s the details.
First, the bad news, and the major obstacle to releasing a final version of the engine:
We have a bug that causes random objects in the games to disappear forever. When this happens Exult tends to crash badly. Unfortunately this bug is unpredictable and we have no sure way of reproducing and thus fixing it. We have some ideas of what is happening but no fix yet. This is a real show stopper and unless we fix it we can’t release another release candidate or a final version. If you encounter this bug (disappearing objects, random crashes, especially in combat) best you can do is revert to an earlier savegame.
However, there is good news too:
The good news is that we welcome a new member to our team, Malignant Manor, a long time user of Exult.
He took on many bugs and improved many other things…
…a full list of which can be found at the Exult project website.
The Exult team have also released Windows- and Mac-specific “all in one” audio packages, which will install all of the digital music pack tracks and sound effects into Exult for you. A manual “do it yourself” package is also available. As such, I’ve taken the liberty of adding these to the available downloads on the Exult project entry. You can also, of course, grab them from their download page.
Didn’t that also happen in the real U7? Looks like their engine reimplementation is a bit too authentic. 🙂
Digital sound packs? You mean people actually missed the constant chewing sound of the flame sword?! 🙂
you know we’ve had the sfx packs for ages, right? 🙂
This all-in-one package is just to make it easier to install that stuff while keeping the initial download smaller.
We’ve had a feature request to bundle at least the mt32 sfx pack with a release but I strongly disagreed to add 20MB to a download to add the sfx that most people already have downloaded and installed before.
OTOH, true, these days adding some MBs, even the whole 50MB the all-in-one pack weighs, isn’t that much of a burden. Still, I dislike that idea.
What do you think people?
And those in favor of adding this, do you already have the files? 🙂