Pentagram

Pentagram is a Free software project to create a game engine that is capable of running Ultima VIII: Pagan. All language versions of Ultima VIII are supported, as are the optional speech files found in Speech Pack and the later releases of the game. After Ultima VIII is fully supported, there are plans to also extend it to Crusader series of games, since these games share the engine. This effort is already partially underway.

State
At the moment, the project has not produced a formal release. The source code is available from SourceForge as snapshots and through Subversion.

The reverse engineering effort to understand Ultima VIII data file formats is complete. Game is barely playable in basic terms: movement, item manipulation and dialogues work, and many scripted sequences and cutscenes work as expected. Animations, sound effects, and intro sequence works, as does the in-game menu, credits display and quotes display. Monster behaviour and combat remains rudimentary, the code lacks optimizations and outputs a lot of debug information which may interfere with gameplay. Save game format has been stabilized. It is very much possible to complete the game from start to finish without encountering too many bugs.

New features
Pentagram features implemented so far that original Ultima VIII didn't have:
 * Support for screen resolutions higher than 320x200, as well as windowed mode
 * High-quality antialiasing
 * Minimap
 * Support for TrueType fonts
 * Support for both hardware MIDI synthesis as well as software synthesis (OPL-3 and General MIDI)

Relationship with Exult
The goal of the project is similar to Exult; in fact, the projects share several developers. Some of Pentagram's features, such as the audio subsystem, have been ported to Exult.