After a lot of testing, changes, upgrades, and more testing, we are pleased to announce a major BYOND upgrade including a brand new pager. The new pager is more functional than the old one, giving you easy access to your favorite games and your friends in a more modern interface.

Please also be sure to read a special note from Tom below. BYOND needs your support!

[Update: Due to a minor issue with the file upload before this post was made, some users downloaded a version that is directing them to the wrong hub port. We ask all of the early adopters to please download again!]

For players: BYOND Pager and Dream Seeker

(See a guided tour on Youtube!)

The first thing you'll see when you open the pager for the first time is a list of games on the left, tabs on the right, starting with your Home tab. The Home tab is where you'll find news, information about your pending updates, and quick access to the last games you played. You can also log in and out easily from this tab.

Over on the left, the Games list is just one tab; you will also have a Friends tab if you're logged in, and if you're a developer you can enable a Resources tab to show you demos and libraries, by using the menu. I'll get back to the menu. First, go to the Games tab and take a look at your choices. You can type in a game quickly using the filter, or search by tags. The games list shows just published games by default (original content), but you can list other games as well by choosing All from the dropdown; this same dropdown will let you select a tag. You also have several options for what kind of list you want to see: The most popular games, what's active, what's new, and other lists like your favorites or what you've recently played.

Clicking on a game in the list will open up a tab on the right. From here you'll see a number of options: You can see the live servers or download it in the Play tab, read its description and view screenshots, see recent activity such as medals awarded and posts by the author, and even look for similar games. Once you select a game to play, the client will launch, downloading necessary resources and connecting to the game server. At this point, a brief advertisement may play--this is how BYOND pays the bills! BYOND Members have the option of disabling this ad.

Back on the left side, go to the Friends tab. From here, you can view your friends and/or your fans, and you can find new friends using the Search feature. Clicking them opens a tab too, and from there you can chat with them. Pager chat has been much improved in this new version to be a lot more responsive than before. Just type and hit Enter to send a message.

This leads to a lot of people's biggest question: What happened to the ability to send mass pages? Well as you know, those were both loved and hated. To preserve the usefulness of the good mass pages, while eliminating spam, we've moved to a much nicer system called the Feed. Every BYOND Member can post to a feed to update their fans, or their games' fans, about what's going on. This is a great way, for instance, to let people know about a server you've just opened up for the game you're working on: Post a link to the feed, and your fans can see it and join. Feed messages only stick around for a couple of weeks at most, so they're meant for short-term use, just like pager messages.

If you're not a Member, you can't post feeds, but you can see what your friends are posting and get updates on the forum posts you're following in your Feed tab, right next to Home. If a post you've followed gets updated, you'll be alerted to go to the Feed tab to see more.

The menu isn't visible on the interface anymore, but we've moved it to a button for easy access. The gear button in the top right will open a menu for you, which is a great way to get at anything you need, like preferences. You can customize the interface colors in the preferences, too.

Right next to the menu button you'll see a button to activate collapsed mode. In collapsed mode, the left side and right side are put together and you'll have a much tighter interface. You can use the same button to switch back to the expanded view.

When you have tabs open, another button will appear that gives you a list you can go through. In expanded mode, only five tabs can be open at once besides Home and Feed; in collapsed mode, just one. This is an easy way to switch between items of interest.

And that's mostly it. We think this upgrade will make the pager a lot more fun to use, and give games a whole new dimension of interactivity.

For developers: Dream Maker and the hub

One of the biggest changes with this release is that we have opened up hub creation to all users again. Restricting hub creation to BYOND Members only was not the incentive we had hoped it to be, so in the interest of encouraging more great game creation we've eased back on this. Some features remain open to Members only, like posting screenshots, as they were before. BYOND Members can also take advantage of the new Feed feature for letting their fans know when a game is in testing or a new server has been launched.

Dream Maker has been improved to handle compilation of large projects much better than before, including by compiling in the background to let the interface be more responsive.

For projects in development, launching Dream Seeker won't bring up any advertisements; we have no intention of interfering with the development of games, because the games are what BYOND is all about.

A full list of fixes and features for this new version can be found here.

A note from Tom:

Hello everyone,

Here is a brief update on the state of BYOND: we need your help!

Here is a lengthier update: we really need your help!

I do not want to come across as desperate, because this has been an amazing project, and we still have so much we want to get done with it. But, unfortunately, we are at a crossroads financially. BYOND has certain development costs (mainly supporting the Top Ramen for the programmers) and, to be blunt, we aren't meeting them. Despite putting in countless hours to maintain this project, I have only lost money from BYOND over the last few years, and unless we change the course, cannot justify working on it further.

This new update is the first time that we are requisitioning a financial contribution through all of our users, either through Memberships or the new interstitial ad system. I sincerely hope this is both successful and not too offputting to our many loyal users; quite simply, we are lost on alternatives. I do not want to see BYOND go the ways of so many projects before it and drift off into the land of abandonware because, despite being a failure as a business, it is quite a success as a software product. Each day, thousands of you use BYOND to build and play games, some of which have even become successful themselves. If you've learned anything from BYOND, if you've ever been entertained by BYOND, please consider purchasing a Membership to help us out. If even a fraction of you did this, we'd be in fine shape!