If you’ve clicked on over to the Pentagram, xu4, or Nuvie websites recently, you may have noticed the ScummVM sticker prominently displayed over each project’s logo. You can see the Pentagram logo above; here are the other two:

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, of course; we first heard about ScummVM incorporating these projects into its collection of game engines almost two months ago. That said, each site has been updated with a short news blurb about the new partnership.

xu4:

As of April 2020 xu4 became a subengine of ScummVM.

After years of stagnation this means that xu4 is not dead after all but will thrive in ScummVM.
Right now code needs to be sortened out and xu4 is not yet in an official ScummVM release.
Keep an eye on ScummVM news and its code on GitHub.

Nuvie:

Nuvie has become a subengine of ScummVM

In a drive by the ScummVM team to add Ultima engines to their list of supported games, the Nuvie team has been convinced to merge with the ScummVM code. At the moment this means that DreamMaster of the ScummVM team is working on seamlessly integrating Nuvie.
Finally people will again be able to work on the two Worlds of Ultima games and if you want to help improving the games, you can always send pull requests to the ScummVM project on GitHub.

We hope this will help people enjoying the games for many more years!

In other news, we had to disable our forum because it has been overrun and crushed by too much spam. And since we are now part of ScummVM we are sure we will find our place in its forum.

Pentagram:

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.

There’s little to be added here that isn’t already captured in the posts above. Two of these engines, especially, had languished without maintenance or updates for years; Nuvie was still being worked on infrequently. Hopefully, their incorporation into the ScummVM ecosystem will lead to further — and more frequent — improvements to each of them.