Well, this is a surprise!

After about four years of silence — although the code has been worked on behind the scenes in that time, and periodic snapshot builds have been released — there is new news to be found on the Exult website, and it’s fairly exciting news as well. To celebrate the 28th anniversary of the release of Ultima 7: The Black Gate, the Exult team have released a new stable build of their cross-platform engine for The Black Gate and Serpent Isle.

Almost ten years after the version 1.4.9rc1, 16 years after the last stable version (v1.2) and 28 years after the official release of Ultima VII – The Black Gate (16 April 1992), we are finally ready to release a new version. With many developers busy with their real life and most having moved on, it took us this long. We have been busy squashing more of the inexplicable crashes but these changes will force us to stop supporting some ancient operating systems.
That’s why we decided to release one last version of Exult, Exult Studio and Exult’s tools for the old OS’ before moving on with development. For really old Windows operating systems (95/98/ME/NT/2000) we prepared a legacy download.
So please grab the new version available on our download page.
The legacy Windows version, the source tarball and the Debian package will be uploaded at a later date.
Please play with it and tell us of any problem you encounter using the forum or bug tracker.

There have been numerous changes made in this version of the engine; it has been ported to SDL2, a shortcut bar has been added to the interface, new scalers have been added, NPC schedules and combat have seen some improvements, party pathfinding when boarding some vehicles has been improved, new paperdoll options have been added, and there’s now an option (in the Windows version, at least) for the app to be portable. You can find a complete list of changes — and another list of known issues — at the project website. And you can find new downloads for Exult, Exult Tools, and Exult Studio both at the project website and here at the Codex.