The Exult team decided to ring in the Mother’s Day weekend with a new stable release of their cross-platform Ultima 7 engine…a release that, per the news posted to the project site, came sooner than anticipated…for good reason:

After this release we are going to swiftly switch to SDL3, which Dragon Baroque as intensively prepared. So the right thing to do is to release a new version with the stable SDL2 backend.

And there are many fixes and improvements over the last version:

• Fixed crash in SI training.
• Running against doors properly opens and closes them.
• Scrolls in SI are now properly displayed.
• Schedules eat-at-inn and desk work were broken.
• Antimagic rain caused by the cube generator is now dissipating fast enough.
• Fixed using too close objects.
• Polymorphed NPCs will revert back to their original bodies when they died.
• List field fights in SI are now properly handled.
• Mini status icons in face stats.
• Emergency savegame and crashlog creation on Windows.
• New higher resolution icons for Exult and Exult Studio.
• Better graphics for the uncut SI intro.
• Several MIDI music fixes.
• Advanced Audio Settings for the MIDI drivers that individually allows choosing which soundfont to use, MIDI conversion, chorus and reverb.
• You can now use FluidLite instead of FluidSynth when compiling Exult.
• Bilinear scaler fixes and refactor.
• With bigger game resolutions the party speed changes sooner.
• The Android port now allows to download games and mods you want to install.
• The GIMP 3.0 plug-in for SHP files.
• Aseprite plug-in for SHP files.

You can, of course, grab the latest downloads of both Exult and its associated toolset via the project’s official downloads page, or via the project entry here at the Codex. The iOS build has also been updated, but downloads of that are only available via the Exult team’s TestFlight instance.