Pentagram, the remake that does for Ultima 8 what Exult did for Ultima 7, has posted news of their development progress for the first time since last December. The team, it seems, has been busy indeed!

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.

Just prior to this news update, I noticed that the Pentagram team had released updated snapshots of both their Windows and Mac builds of the game, and both of these updates have been added to the project entry. I’ve also updated the local copy of the Pentagram source code.