In game development, it is not uncommon for developers using a specific engine to suddenly require features that the engine’s creators did not include. And lately, this has proven to be the case with the Exult engine.

Ideal Dragon has been making excellent progress in building Ultima 8: Exult, but found himself stymied by the fact that Exult — being a reworking of the Ultima 7 game engine — didn’t really allow for much in the way of cutscenes. Yes, there are the short cutscenes at the beginning and end of Ultima 7 (and Serpent Isle as well), and Exult would play these…but it didn’t support custom cutscenes, of the sort that one might want to swap in if one were (say) remaking a different Ultima game using the Exult engine.

Those of you that watch the Exult GitHub page may thus have taken note of this particular pull request, which set in motion the process of adding support for custom, scripted cutscenes to be used in Exult. As the feature’s documentation explains:

Playscene

Allows creating animated and/or text cutscenes using the media Exult knows how to handle. Namely FLIC animations, audio files OGG, WAV, VOC and also playback of a games’ music and sfx tracks.

Exult will automatically look for intro, endgame, quotes and credits cutscenes in a game’s or a mod’s patch folder (files: intro_info.txt, intro.flx, endgame_info.txt, …) and play these instead of the original.

You can use these cutscenes in game with the UI_play_scene intrinsic (see exult_intrinsics.txt for details).

Note that there are two things being added here: the ability to swap in custom cutscenes to replace the introduction and endgame cutscenes, and the ability to cause cutscenes to play during normal gameplay.

Naturally, Dominus Dragon has tested out getting the Ultima 8 introduction and endgame to play in Exult…but the truly impressive video has to be the one embedded below, which showcases how a cutscene can be triggered at any arbitrary point in the game. For now, this feature is confined to the development branch of Exult; it’ll likely be a while before it makes it into a stable release. But for those looking to add some flavour to their Exult mods, this is a powerful new feature.