For those of you who were fans of the other Origin-developed series that used the Ultima 8 engine, there’s some potentially exciting news to be found over at the Echo Sector forums (Echo Sector being the equivalent of the Ultima Codex for the Crusader fan community):

Hi Crusader fans,

The Pentagram Ultima 8 engine was integrated into ScummVM recently, and I decided to work on some improvements for it. In the process I got interested in the Crusader games – the engines are based on the U8 one, and there was some early-stage support already in Pentagram.

stauff, the forum member there who appears to be the main developer working on integrating Crusader into ScummVM, has posted several updates to that thread, along with videos of the game running under ScummVM. The most recent update, as of this writing, had this to say:

Another quick update, since I fixed a bunch of small things and I’m happy about them:

• 16-direction combat stance now works
• weapon overlay works, so you can see the silencer’s gun and firing
• Added the “fade from grey” at the start (although it’s a bit short, probably need to make it longer to match the game)
• Fixed the silencer’s teleport-in animation at the start
• Fixed the engine execution speed so that the machine gun doors slide down at the correct rate (and all the other timed things now happen at the right speed)

It’s starting to look like a game!

And here’s the video accompanying the update, if you’d like to check that out: