It's finally here: BYOND 4.0 is available for public beta testing. This release represents a significant upgrade to the user interface capabilities of BYOND, allowing developers and players to customize the look and feel of games like never before. We think you'll like it.

Major improvements include:

• Skins, or customized interfaces for games.
• Icons are 32-bit with full alpha transparency. The new DMI format is based on PNG, and can be edited in any external image editor that preserves PNG comments.
• JPEG and GIF formats are now supported, including import of GIF animations.
• New hosting controls for Dream Daemon (Windows version), including bans and flexible private hosting.
• OpenGL is used for map drawing on any machine that supports it.
• Because OpenGL can scale the map, world.view can be much larger now.

Note: this is beta software. Back up your files before proceeding. Don't say we didn't warn you!

Download/Notes: BYOND 400.951

• Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/Vista
• Linux server
• FreeBSD 4.x server
• Release Notes

Please post thorough bug reports in the Bug Reports forum, and general discussion in the Member news blog.

For developers who want to work with skins but don't know where to start, the first part of a tutorial series has been posted at Dream Makers.

Huge thanks to everyone in the beta test group! We couldn't have done it without you.