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.