Is there something big in the Horizon?

[The Viking]

The forum has been rather slow lately, and there has been few new snaphots - is this possibly a sign of something big on the horizon? (A new snapshot with Crysta Elf's new art, or possibly even an "official" 1.4 release?)

[Dominus]

official 1.4 is miles away

Seriously development is not going into any planned direction atm. Dr. Code will break the savegames soonish, Marzo is working on breaking the paperdoll part of Exult (actually he is working on freeing it from current limitations), I *think* Colourless wanted to take shots at the display code and so on...
Of course everyone is always busy with real life as well.
Wjp will be gone for the next two weeks and unless someone else takes care of Crysta's art, this will not be taken care of before his return.

[The Viking]

Dominus wrote:

"Marzo is working on breaking the paperdoll part of Exult (actually he is working on freeing it from current limitations)"

Does this mean we might be able to use e.g. the belt and back slots at the same time in BG, as in Serpent Isle?

"Dr. Code will break the savegames soonish" - in other words old savegames will soon be unusable?

[marzo]

"Marzo is working on breaking the paperdoll part of Exult (actually he is working on freeing it from current limitations)"

Does this mean we might be able to use e.g. the belt and back slots at the same time in BG, as in Serpent Isle?

No. What I am working on is on removing hard-coded from Exult into external files, so that mods can have their own custom paperdolls for NPCs/weapons.

[Dominus]

belt/back slots - no, this is just a limitation of BG that is only not that transparent because we hacked the SI paperdoll art in What I meant is that Marzo is taking the SI paperdoll art code apart. Can't word it correctly, maybe Marzo wants to elaborate.

Savegames might get broken totally, maybe just partially, so that old ones might still work, but new, corrected features are not working correctly. But before an outcry comes, be aware that a new official release would mean that we'd not support pre-1.4x (or more likely 1.5) savegames. Too many fixes might not seem fixed unless you start a new game.

[Colourless]

Just so people don't get 'scared' all savegames from V1.0 should still work. We wont intentially totally break savegames from previous releases. We will integrate workarounds so old savegames still load. But as happens a lot, fixes wont appear if you use old games.

However it's quite likely new savegames will not be loadable by older versions of Exult which isn't too surprising.

-Colourless Dragon

[drcode]

Not sure if we've ever totally broken old Exult savegames. Like Colourless said, we'll always try to make it possible to load older savegames into newer versions of Exult.

The changes I'm planning are mainly for modders: We'd like to be able to save/restore mana/magic for all NPC's, and we'd like to have the ability to add new NPC attributes (like "karma" or "charisma").