If you’ve checked out either the Exult website or the project’s Facebook page recently, you’ll likely have noticed that Dominus posted a news update to both, relating the current state of the cross-platform Ultima 7 engine.

State of Exult or why there is still no new version

It’s been 3 1/2 years since the release candidate and almost a decade since our last full release. Duke Nukem Forever was released since then. Imagine that.

So why is there still no new release of Exult?

After the 1.2 release Exult went into experimental mode, mostly making it easier and more stable to mod the original games via Exult Studio. Along with that many lingering issues, missing features and unknown data files from the original got implemented. In turn that broke other things in Exult and for a long time, Exult was just too unstable to be released. When development slowed down we fixed a lot of stuff and released 1.4.9rc1 – making it a release candidate on purpose. It generated enough interest for people to play Exult again and send us their bug reports and there were a lot. Some even game breaking and when the disappearing objects bug was discovered it proved we were correct in not labeling the release a full release. Since that bug has been squished the 1.4.9rc1 is no longer linked to on our site to prevent people using that and run into that severe bug.

And now we seem to be in a situation that everytime we think Exult could be ready for a new release, some new bug is discovered that prevents us from releasing.

This time the big bad bug is a flaw in which we handle game eggs (see Bug #1875). Mostly you will not notice that something is wrong until you reach to the abandoned outpost in SI and get slaughtered by the misbehaving fire shooter/energy barrier trap room (see Bug #1848 – savegame included) or when you notice that the anti magic rain in BG never stops until you restart Exult or whatever (see Bug #1865).

Whenever this is fixed you can expect another round of bug reports coming in about all the things now broken…
(not to mention countless other stuff, including some bug in the way we handle midi music, some BG intro things etc…)

Whenever – because development of Exult is currently not really existing, it hasn’t for a while and doesn’t look like it is picking up soon. There have been small bursts of bug fixing, mostly by Marzo, Willem and Malignant Manor but these are getting fewer and fewer.

Exult is now almost 16 years old and a lot of the developers have been with it since then. Lives and interests change and it’s hard to keep interested in something like Exult that at times is easier to break than to fix.

So, is Exult dead? No, but it’s not teeming with life and as has been written before, without new developers Exult might never leave this state.

Don’t mistake this for a farewell, we just want to be frank about these things.

The main takeaway here is that after over a decade of development, the Exult team (to the extent that it exists at present) needs some new members, fresh eyes on the project…people with the time and energy to carry on work on the engine.

Not that the engine is in a decrepit state by any stretch of the imagination; far from it! It’s playable, works well in general (heck, it works great in most cases), and allows one to play both The Black Gate and Serpent Isle through to completion. But is there room for improvement? Certainly; there are always more bugs to squash, and I’m sure that more features could be dreamed up for and included with Exult under the right circumstances. But that requires people…and their time and effort.

So…anyone want to help out with Exult? Anyone feel like bringing the project into its second decade?