Exult Forum

whats going on with pentagram?

Pentagram? What's that?

Seriously though, we're still working on it, although real life and other projects are keeping us fairly busy. I did spend a large part of today on U8's data files, btw

Help!

I drop the pentagram.cfg in the same directory where the pentagram app lies, but i got following error-message (under MaxOS X):

Welcome to Darwin!
Axel-Seibels-Computer:~ uxl$ /Volumes/Daten/Pentagram/Ultima8/pentagram; exit
Initialising SDL...
Creating Kernel...
Creating FileSystem...
Creating Configuration...
virtual path "@home": .
Trying built-in data path
virtual path "@data": data
Problem mounting virtual path "@data": directory not found: data
Loading configuration files:
@data/pentagram.cfg... Failed
@home/pentagram.cfg... Failed
Game:
Reading "config/general/data" config key.
Key not found. Data path set to default.
Scanning config file for games:
No games set up in configuration. Please read the README for instructions.
logout

which brings the lousy pentagram documentations guy to surface...
I really need to update the instructions again, but as we probaby will change the way our cfg works soon (?), I'd rather not...

Try first going to the pentagram directory:

cd /Volumes/Daten/Pentagram/Ultima8/; ./pentagram

@wjp

No betterment!

Welcome to Darwin!
Axel-Seibels-Computer:~ uxl$ cd /
Axel-Seibels-Computer:/ uxl$ cd Volumes/Daten/Pentagram/Ultima8
Axel-Seibels-Computer:/Volumes/Daten/Pentagram/Ultima8 uxl$ ls -l
total 34120
drwx------ 14 uxl admin 476 21 Feb 21:03 SOUND
drwx------ 21 uxl admin 714 21 Feb 21:09 STATIC
drwx------ 5 uxl admin 170 21 Feb 21:09 USECODE
drwxr-xr-x 7 uxl admin 238 21 Feb 22:36 data
-rwxr-xr-x 1 uxl admin 17461712 21 Feb 22:24 pentagram
-rw-r--r-- 1 uxl admin 760 22 Feb 01:12 pentagram.cfg
Axel-Seibels-Computer:/Volumes/Daten/Pentagram/Ultima8 uxl$ ./pentagram
Initialising SDL...
Creating Kernel...
Creating FileSystem...
Creating Configuration...
virtual path "@home": .
Trying built-in data path
virtual path "@data": data
Loading configuration files:
@data/pentagram.cfg... Failed
@home/pentagram.cfg... Failed
Game:
Reading "config/general/data" config key.
Key not found. Data path set to default.
Scanning config file for games:
No games set up in configuration. Please read the README for instructions.

The README says: "In Linux, this has to be in a ~/.pentagram directory." What did ~/ mean?

'~' means your home directory, but the '~/.pentagram' directory is not used in darwin. It (currently) reads pentagram.cfg from the current directory.

The line 'virtual path "@home": .' means that it mapped '@home' to the current directory ('.'). Later it tries to open '@home/pentagram.cfg', which should then be pentagram.cfg in the current directory. Not sure why that is failing.

I found the problem!
It seems that pentagram isn't able to recognize cfg-files created or edited with Apple's TextEdit. Shame on me!
But now i have an other problem. During the initialization of the world-data i got following error message: "Fatal signal: Bus Error (SDL Parachute Deployed)".
Any ideas?

Yeah, it works!
I forgot to copy the original savegame folder into the pentagram directory.

Ah, yes, it seems I forgot to check if u8save.000 existed. I'll make it give a semi-proper error message.

On this topic, is Pentagram "usable" yet?

I've been trying U8Win and VDM sound with Ultima 8. I can get it to run, and I can get nice MIDI music, but no sound. Without VDM running, sounds like a sackful of angry cats being hit with a base loudspeaker in the middle of running water. With VDM, it just generates weird noises instead of actual sound effects.

I've a NVidia motherboard with a built-in sound card, which has served pretty well all things considered. I can use VDMsound successfully with Ultima 6, but not Ultima 8.

So, does Pentagram work well enough to run the game with sound? If so, I'll be more than happy to jump on the bug hunt team.

Adamantyr

It's nowhere near playable yet, I'm afraid. You can walk around and talk to people a bit, but a lot is still unimplemented. (Although we're slowly but surely getting there )

you can also try dosbox http://dosbox.sf.net. The latest release supports U8 with intro, music and sfx/voice.
But it is not the fastest...

man ultima 8 in 800x600 resolution is freaking nice, the gfx are as good as diablo 2 except the spells, btw do yall need a better webpage for pentagram?

Yesterday I tried out the win32-snapshot in VPC and saw that there is an implementation for a new font: verabd.ttf. So I copied it in my data folder but it seems that it didn't work under MacOS X!
Why isn't verabd.ttf included in CVS yet?

Did you compile pentagram with ttf support?