11 April 2020
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After years of stagnation Pentagram became a subengine of
ScummVM and is already
experiencing many bugfixes. It's not yet in an official ScummVM
release but you can follow its progress on
GitHub.
We hope that Ultima 8 gets all the love it needs on ScummVM and maybe,
just maybe someone decides to take on the Crusader games.
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6 January 2013
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Further bugfixes this week include two issues with collision detection
that could let objects move through walls, and a bug with loading
savegames that had a small chance of producing weird behaviour for
certain saves. Another visible change is that cheats are now disabled
by default. They can be re-enabled by adding cheat=true to
the config file.
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3 January 2013
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We started this year with a fix of an eight year old bug causing
gradual object leaks. This bug would eventually have unpredictable
symptoms including missing objects, broken menus and crashes. Savegames
where this leak has not yet reached a critical level will now be
automatically repaired when loading them.
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22 April 2012
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Ultima 8 is now available for sale from GOG.com! Initial tests show that Pentagram supports it without any problems.
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15 October 2010
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Thanks to people over on the
Exult forum
pushing us to fix more bugs, work on Pentagram has continued recently.
Special thanks go to Gruck for playing through all
of Ultima 8 in Pentagram (confirming the game can still be successfully
finished) and reporting any bugs he encountered, a number of which
have been fixed now.
A useful new feature is the addition of extra save game slots: there are
now 96 of them instead of the original 12.
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12 September 2008
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In the last few months, interest in Pentagram seems to have picked up
again. A number of bugs were fixed since the last update, including camera
fixes, key handling, containers (backpack, barrels, etc.), and a fix for a
problem in the German versions of the U8. The default key binding for
stasis moved from 'S' to 'F10'. The build should now properly support
versions of autoconf greater than 2.60.
Mac OS X builds also received a lot of attention. They build system
switched from XCode to a makefile-based system that builds Pentagram and
dependencies using their traditional configure script and make methods.
This allows us a greater amount of control over the builds and should help
prevent changes to Pentagram for unix systems that break OS X builds and
vice versa.
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5 December 2007
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Despite the lack of updates to the website, work on Pentagram has
been progressing. Among other things, combat music now works,
avatar attack speed has been improved, many rendering order problems
are fixed, and falling and throwing are now working much better.
The Pentagram main menu has also been improved, and now supports
loading savegames directly.
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9 May 2007
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The last months we have made further improvements to pathfinding.
Avatar movement has been enhanced a bit, as well as item manipulation
and missile trajectories.
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9 January 2007
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A new developer, Brian Tietz, has joined our team, and has improved
the pathfinding in Pentagram. We have also fixed a number of bugs,
including a crash in combat, some objects falling through the floor,
and several smaller glitches.
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7 July 2006
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For the last few weeks, we made efforts to improve support for
Mac OS X. Snapshot binaries are now available on the download page.
This version is a universal binary and should work on 10.3 and above.
Have fun.
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28 April 2006
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Since the last update we have fixed numerous minor issues with
item and NPC interaction. The combat behaviour of monsters has also
been improved a bit, although it is still far from perfect.
Furthermore, support for the Japanese version of Ultima 8
should now be at the same level as that for the other languages.
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19 February 2006
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The last few months have been a bit quiet, but development has been
moving forward. We have fixed a couple of potentially serious
usecode interpreter bugs, and some further Avatar movement problems.
Preliminary support for the
Japanese version
of Ultima 8 has also been added.
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15 November 2005
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Today we have fixed the Pentagram savegame format. This means that
from this point onward, we will try our best to maintain backward
compatibility for savegames, so you can be fairly sure next month's
version of Pentagram will still be able to load tomorrow's savegames.
Unfortunately this comes at a price: all savegames created before
today can no longer be loaded in new builds of Pentagram.
Other changes this last month include a rudimentary game selection
menu, fixes to last month's improvements to Avatar movement and
various minor bug fixes.
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6 October 2005
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In the last couple of months the behind-the-scenes work has continued,
with changes to savegames, game autodetection and key bindings.
The more visible changes include antialiasing of the truetype fonts,
detection of stealing and hopefully improved Avatar movement.
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27 July 2005
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This week's bugfixes include a plot-stopping rendering bug
that prevented you from reading a book Mythran gives you. Also,
monster pathfinding has been changed significantly (hopefully
improving it), a problem with teleporting has been solved,
and training with Darion has been fixed.
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10 July 2005
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There has been quite a bit of behind-the-scenes work this month
towards video options, audio options and game selection menus.
We also fixed a number of bugs, including timing problems in
scripted sequences and some minor inventory-related bugs.
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11 June 2005
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Special effects for magic weapons are now working, such as
Flame Sting's fire effects. Also, some more types of monster treasure
have been implemented, including weaponry and sorcery reagents
and foci. Furthermore, container windows and text should no
longer appear partially off-screen.
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8 May 2005
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Since last month, Pentagram starts with the Ultima 8 intro and
lets you enter your name in the diary, and we have
also implemented the save/load sections of the diary. Item placement
in containers has been improved with items now placed at random
locations instead of always in the top left corner.
Various bugs related to combat, pathfinding and object collisions
have been fixed.
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15 April 2005
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We have added many more sound effects since the last update and
have also implemented intro/endgame audio and support for the
speech pack. The combat code has been improved further as well:
monsters (and the Avatar) should now react properly when hit.
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25 March 2005
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Another major update this week: sound effects! SFX are still missing
in some places, but expect those to be gradually added during the
next couple of weeks. Also, the Ultima 8 credits and quotes sections
have been implemented.
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15 March 2005
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New this week, a Minimap! Yep, a Minimap. While a touch on the
experimental side at the moment, it is for sure something that many
players probably wished they had while traversing the catacombs. Check
out the screenshots section to see it in action. Other changes this
week, some fancy memory management code and some bug fixes.
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25 February 2005
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A rather big change this week. Scaling has been added to Pentagram.
The most obvious difference is Ultima 8 now runs at the 320x200
resolution that the original ran at. This fixes a few game breaking
problems. The selection of scalers is limited at the moment, but more
will be added.
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5 February 2005
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Several cosmetic and other minor fixes this week: the avatar will look
around when idle, NPCs play their talk animation while talking,
some previously broken spellcasting animations now work properly,
double-right-clicking the avatar will toggle combat mode and NPC
schedules are properly set every hour.
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25 January 2005
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Bugfixes this month include a number of problems
with dragging, NPC schedules, inventory weight calculation and
the towers of Hanoi puzzle.
We also implemented the bedroll (b) and keyring (k) shortcut keys.
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5 January 2005
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Happy New Year! We've recently implemented compressed savegames, which
has shrunk them to under 200Kb. There's now also some very basic
monster pathfinding, so monsters will (try to, and often fail to)
walk up to you and attack you. Finally, we're happy to report that
the (extremely annoying) vertical screen flipping feature
is now somewhat working.
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24 November 2004
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Quite a few improvements the last ten days:
the avatar will heal and regain mana gradually now, the Grant Peace
spell should be working and the avatar-seeking fireballs in the
Shrine of the Ancient Ones have been implemented. Additionally, more
work has been done on combat: be careful, since monsters will now
hit you if you're standing right in front of them.
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14 November 2004
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We've fixed a number of bugs last week, including two plot stoppers.
Missiles (such as fish) now use proper collision detection so they
won't fly through the avatar. We also did some internal work on combat;
nothing visible yet, but it's getting closer.
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4 November 2004
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Not much news this week. We did fix the worst problems with
the avatar dying, which means that you won't get up again after you
die now.
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24 October 2004
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Since last week, Pentagram will automatically play the introductory
sequence at startup (Camera scrolling to the Avatar, Avatar getting
up and talking to Devon).
It can be disabled with the `skipstart' config option.
We also fixed some issues with collision detection, which means that
the rolling spiked spheres should now properly roll and turn.
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14 October 2004
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There is now an option in the config file to use a TrueType font
(currently only Bitstream Vera) for conversations. Saving
and loading from the diary menu is now working properly. There
have also been some bugfixes and improvements related to the user
interface.
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4 September 2004
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In the last couple of weeks we've fixed a lot of bugs,
ranging from serious crashes to cosmetic issues. The result of this
is that many of the scripted sequences that were broken are now
mostly working. We've even fixed a bug in U8's usecode that
occurred in the original game too.
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14 August 2004
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In the last couple of weeks, we rewrote parts of the
animation/movement system. This should lead to improvements in
Avatar movement and pathfinding in the near future. Targeted jumping
has been implemented, and this is now the default jumping
mode. The jumping mode will become an option later.
Additionally, item dragging has been improved, and you can
now split up stacks of items (very useful for necromancy spellcasting).
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24 July 2004
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Not much to report this week, but one notable change is that you can
now precisely drop items where the mouse is pointing instead of
somewhere in the general area.
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14 July 2004
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Since last week, you can climb walls and other objects. Also,
monsters will now die properly most of the time (e.g., ghosts vanish,
seekers explode, skeletons get up again after a while) and
leave treasure.
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4 July 2004
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This week we have added the beginnings of combat to Pentagram.
You can now hit people and monsters and they will take damage
and die. Monsters won't fight back yet, though. (It will probably
take quite some time before we implemented monster AI.)
Also, monsters don't leave loot yet.
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24 June 2004
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Welcome to our brand-new website.
A Pentagram status update: work has been progressing steadily. As you
can see in our screenshots section, a lot
of the Ultima 8 plot is working quite well. However, other major parts
of the game, such as combat, still need a lot of work.
Monster AI is still completely unimplemented.
We recently managed to decode the SFX file format used, as well as the
cutscene format used in the intro and endgame movies, which means that
all of the file formats used by Ultima 8 have now been decoded
for the most part, although there are still some remaining details
to be worked out.
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12 March 2004
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UltimaDot published an interview with the Pentagram team, including a screenshot gallery.
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