Exult Forum

Before I stumble my way through trying to figure out how to compile exult on windows is there any instructions to follow?

Also is there a design document anyplace that describes what the file structure is? So I don't need to spend hours/days figuring out where to start with experimenting with things?

Sorry, Ignore first part of the above post. Guess it was a little late last night when I read the README.win32 thinking it just had Linux instructions and was a place holder as I saw the pacman lines and made assumptions.. you know what they say about assumptions.

Second question still stands.. is there a design document/list of what file contains/is supposed to contain what?

No, there are no design documents... it's a poorly documented giant of code

But the subfolders are easy enough:
audio
conf: for the xml config stuff
content: holds the mods by the Exult team
data: holds the files Exult needs and the two games need
desktop: files needed for linux desktop
docs: well, it should have the design document
files: how to access and use files
flic: to handle the animations in the fli/flic format (SI has those in the intro/outro)
gamemgr: how to handle the different games and mods
gumps: is all about the onscreen gui elements
headers: headers we need and include
imagewin: everything about drawing on the screen with imagewin.cc the main protagonist
ios: needed only for the iOS port
m4: m4 stuff
macosx: what we need for macOS
mapedit: Exult Studio magic
msvcstuff
objs: how to handle objects in the game, generally and psecifc stuff like eggs, jawbone, spellbook, virtue stones...
pathfinder
server: the server/client stuff that Exult uses with Exult Studio
shapes: the graphics of the game
tools, various tools we have
usecode: important to handle the U7 scripting language usecode
win32
and then of course everything in the root. But it's mostly self explaining from the names.
Our explanation is that Exult evolved from a map viewer to a game engine to a fully editable game engine...

appreciate the explanation, is there a discord or IRC channel I could join to ask conversational questions about how best to proceed?

Does anyone really know the exult code base well enough these days to make "quick" changes or are you guys waiting for someone to come along and learn the codebase to start making changes and be that guy?(probably not me as I actually am envisioning a different future using exult as a backend to a new front end(why re-invent the wheel... if I even could))

We've always been on IRC, these days on libera http://exult.info/about.php

We are not in a healthy position these days, most developers have quietly dropped out