Pentagram developer WJP remarked, in this thread at the Exult forums, that little in the way of development on Pentagram has been done this year. The cross-platform engine for Ultima 8 has been in a “nearly complete” state for about a year now, with one major hurdle left to surmount:

The first thing that needs to be done is (play)testing to see which bug reports are still valid, and if any new bugs crept in. I don’t recall any freezes, so those may have been introduced (relatively) recently. The last few changes likely didn’t get enough testing to be entirely stable. After that we can determine how tricky the various issues will be to fix. Some of them will likely be accessible to someone not yet very familiar with the code.

In the same thread, Colourless Dragon explains further:

…Pentagram…mostly just needs lots and lots of polish. Most things work mostly correctly now. The things that don’t work properly will probably manifest themselves as really annoying bugs. So it’s not dead, just no one is interested enough in doing to ‘slow boring’ work of just bug fixing.

In other words:

What, no Uncle Sam?

The Exult forums require no registration. If you’d like to help out WJP and the team, drop your name there.

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