Pentagram Interview
Octarine Dragon, 2004-03-12

Octarine Dragon hooked up with Willem Jan and Ryan from the Pentagram team and got them to talk about their attempt to recreate the Ultima 8 engine.

UltimaDot: Who are you, what is your background with games and game development and how come you are leading a team doing a Ultima remake for today's systems?

Both: All of the main Pentagram developers are also part of the Exult team. After Exult v1.0 was out, a group of us started hacking away at Ultima 8, as a sort of natural progression from Ultima 7 to 8.

UltimaDot: Why Ultima 8 of all Ultimas? I don't seem to recall it as a common
favourite...

WJP: Ultima 8 was the first Ultima I played, and I still like it, even though it may be less of 'an Ultima' than the earlier ones (feel free to define the meaning of 'an Ultima' yourself :-) ).
Other than that, the engine itself is quite well designed, so it's interesting from a technical point of view as well.

Ryan: Why not? Sure, Ultima 8 is one of the more hated Ultima's but we liked it. The Ultima 8 engine was also used by the two Crusader games and we hope to support them too. It also seemed like a natural progression from Exult.

UltimaDot: Snooping around your website, I came across quite a few familiar names in the Ultima community. Tell us a little about your team.

Ryan: At the moment the team is made up of group of the developers from Exult. We've been working together for many more years than I would have ever thought.

WJP: It's a great team to work with :-)

UltimaDot: What is your vision for Pentagram, exactly?

Both: We're aiming to see Ultima 8 and the Crusader games perfectly playable,
fixing up some of the more annoying interface problems along the way. Of course, this is a long-term vision.

UltimaDot: This sounds pretty similar to what Exult did and does for Ultima 7. How do the two projects compare in your view?

Ryan: In a lot of ways Exult and Pentagram are similar. Though with Pentagram we are trying to avoid making the same mistakes we did with Exult.

UltimaDot: Are there any intentions to eventually have an editor similar to where Exult are aiming with their Exult Studio? I imagine there are some folks out there who would like nothing better than to finally see/create a Lost Vale. :)

Ryan: Yeah, at some stage you might see an editor integrated into Pentagram. The Pentagram engine itself is being designed to be easily extended. Hopefully making modifications to the games shouldn't be too difficult. It would be great to see someone make a Lost Vale mod with Pentagram.

UltimaDot: Where is your project currently at, what major things have you already accomplished and what great feats still lie ahead of you and your team?

WJP: While Pentagram is not really usable or playable currently, behind the scenes things are really going quite well. Map displaying, conversations, basic movement and saving/loading are all working to some extent. We recently started working on combat a bit, although that's still in the talk/design phase. "Slow but steady" would probably
describe our progress best.

Ryan: While a lot has been done there is probably far more to do then we have already done. Combat is non existant. While some might think this is a good thing, it is a vital part of the game. There is also absolutely no AI in Pentagram. A lot of other aspects don't quite work properly yet either.

UltimaDot: Are you able to access all original U8 data files or are you forced to 'reconstruct' some things on your own?

Both: We have pretty much been able to reverse engineer all of the Ultima 8 formats (in fact, we figured out the last file just last week), although some details are still guesses. We're pretty sure we'll be able to properly interpret all of the data from the U8 data files in the future.
That said, various bits of data were hard coded into the engine, such as data for weapons, armour and monsters. Those make things more difficult.

UltimaDot: Have you been in contact with or even had input from any members of the original design team?

Ryan: Not directly no. Indirectly Jason Ely has been a huge help. A few years back he was quite active on Usenet giving out various details about the Ultima 8 engine internals.

UltimaDot: Face it: Your website is lousy. ;) Are you planning on replacing it with something nicer and more up to date?

WJP: Yes, our website won't win any prizes currently :-)

The reason for this is mainly that the current Pentagram is not yet in a sufficiently playable, usable and stable state. For example, the config file format is still not fixed (in fact, we're planning a major change soon), changes in the engine are causing our savegames to break at least once each month and there's not much you can really do in Pentagram, currently. So, we're currently focusing on improving Pentagram itself. I promise we'll (try to) improve our website once Pentagram becomes playable. ;-)

UltimaDot: Thank you and your team for your answers, and good luck with
Pentagram. We're looking forward to check back with you in a while and
report on your progress.

Both: You're very welcome.