Brad Hannah has posted a development update for his voxel-based remake of Ultima 5, which — in addition to a lengthy list of changes and updates — contains news of a demo for us to try out:

There is a pre-pre-alpha demo available for Windows and MacOS here: https://github.com/bradhannah/Ultima5Redux-Demos/blob/master/README.md! This version is not a game – it some core mechanics with endless bugs, but it’s something 🙂 I hope you like it. Please follow the instructions, if you don’t then you will only be disappointed.

You can grab the demo — there are Windows and OS X versions available — via the link above, or from the project entry here at the Codex. As to the aforementioned changes, Brad has this to say:

• Improved pathfinding
  • tile weighting allowing NPCs to favour dirt paths and brick roads over grassy shortcuts
  • smarter wandering and collision correction
  • comprehensive simulation of NPC travel over full day for every single town, keep and every single NPC
• Improved directory/save game selection menu which was previously very buggy
• Klimbing down grates and falling through floors (think Blackthorne’s Palace!)
• Mirrors now reflect and can be broken by Avatar
• Fixed a ton of long standing bugs
  • NPCs getting stuck/deadlocked
  • “Bleeding tiles” on outside tiles of townes
  • Conversation bugs causing crashing with gold or item transactions
• Upgraded to latest High Defintion Render Pipeline for Unity
• Created first pre-alpha release

There’s a few more things on the list, as well as some other updates (e.g. to the project mind map), which you can check out for yourself in the update proper; click on through to give that a read. And, if you’re feeling daring, check out the demo; it’s jaw-dropping what Brad has been able to do, visually, with Ultima 5’s now-ancient tile graphics.