Exult - Free Game Engine - MYCPLUS - C and C++ Programming Resources

Exult is a FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) game Engine. It is written in C++ and runs on Mac, Windows and Linux. Exult was developed in 2004 to recreate a massive hit game of 1990’s called Ultima VII. It is created for the revival of Ultima VII (The Black Gate) and Ultima VII part2 (Serpent Isle) on modern PCs. The engine uses the original data files of these two games.

Ultima Series was started by two game companies, Electronic Arts and Bioware mythic, in 1981. The classics Ultima VII (The Black Gate) and Ultima VII (Serpent Isle) were released in 1992 and 1993 respectively. Ultima VII is very first RPG (role-playing game), that had huge fan following. But it was unable to run on modern computers as it was a DOS game and had memory management issue. It used a custom Memory manager that was incompatible with EMM(Expanded Memory Managers) of MS-DOS.

I originally wrote it [Exult] solely for X-windows, so that’s where the ‘X’ comes from. The “ult”, of course, comes from Ultima. It was only about 6 months ago [02/29/2000] that I replaced the X code with SDL, which is multiplatform.
Jeff S. Freedman, aka “DrCode”

The Exult was developed to make these games playable on latest computers. The first stable version of Exult was released in 2004 and on 28^th anniversary of Ultima VII- The Black Gate, the new version of Exult is recently released in 2020.

Although it is possible to write games, yet no other game is developed in this engine. Until now it only supports Ultima 7.

Game Engine Features

Anti-aliasing and other filters to provide smoother graphics.
Save mode improvements to allow several save slots.
Different modes of combat difficulty from -3 (Very Easy) to +3 (Very Difficult).
Status bars for the characters.
Ability to translate test into other language.
Support for higher resolution screen for area mode and window mode.
Paper-doll support to represent characters’ inventory.
New built-in cheat codes and game-play options.
MIDI digital music effects.
Exult studio that allows users to create their own games.