Yesterday, a day short of Ultima VII: The Black Gate's 28th anniversary, we released the version 1.6 of Exult. Only took us 16 years to have a proper release...

With this release we are leaving old operating systems behind (Windows < XP, OS X < 10.7), for a couple of reasons:
- we switched to SDL2 and the old SDL 1.2x is not properly maintained anymore and some features we are using are not fully supported.
- more importantly, to fix a truckload of bugs made us use c++14 and this means some OS are left behind (because supporting them is painful without much gain)
- keeping our GTK based Exult Studio backwards compatible is really hard to do...

The full release text:

Almost ten years after the version 1.4.9rc1, 16 years after the last stable version (v1.2) and 28 years after the official relea […]
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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 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.

A brief list of the most important changes in Exult since v1.4.9rc1:

Shortcut bar with important shortcuts right on top of the screen (thanks Litchie)
Switch to SDL2 - important for up to date OS'
NxBR and HQ3x/HQ4x scalers
Option to drop stacks of items without confirmation
Some more combat options to make charmed combat more difficult
Schedules got a work-over and are more closer to the original but not yet perfect
NPCs using beds are sleeping better now
Paperdoll support of wearing diapers
Portable option for Windows
Separate settings for fullscreen and windowed mode possible
HighDPI mode available on macOS
Better pathfinding when the party boards a barge
Fixed most inexplicable crashes
Serpent Isle Beta version works
Cleaned up the code in many places and fixed many compiler warnings
Tons of bugfixes
But we do have known issues:

Some crashes due to some cached-out objects, we are working on this in another branch which will be the main snapshot after this release
Antimagic rain caused by the cube generator is not dissipating as fast as it should
Exult does not show the "you have beaten Ultima VII in n days" message
Exult does not return to the game menu after beating the game (instead it quits)
The BG intro does not have the proper sound effects
Fire Elementals cannot walk across lava
Some schedules need more detailed love
Several bugs that need more in-depth looking at but no plot-stopping bugs
When you disable "Gumps pause game", certain events might only happen after you close all gumps

Disclaimer: I'm part of the Exult team so this could be seen as self promotion, but I think Exult is relevant enough to be posted about here 😀