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[Mr. T]

  The game appears and disappears due to hosting problems, but I looks like this is a clone of Dwarf Fortress with music, sprite graphics, and an in depth system with some innovations not seen in Dwarf Fortress, but otherwise a copy, with the adventure and strategy mix, starting with wagons, similar combat damage system, and even the mushroom-logs for wood in caves. The coding for BYOND is similar to Java, and techniques could be transferable. The creator's screen-name is Ginseng.

  I used to get on BYOND a lot and knew of this before I played Dwarf Fortress, and though Dwarf Fortress is better, if the information was shared the results would be amazing for both parties.

[Capntastic]

Toady's said before he doesn't want to work with others, and personally I don't see why he'd team up with someone who is already making a similar (and inevitably inferior) game.

[RebelZhouYuWu]

The games have two very big differences, one is multiplayer the other isn't.

[Kholint]

BYOND is fantastic, lovely and gorgeous ( ), but you'd be hard pressed to get something on the scale of DF running smoothly.
It actually supports features like a DF-style text mode right of the box, but it's simply not fast enough to run all the pathfinding and such that DF does in real-time and get a decent frame rate.

Still, they're welcome to try!

[Davion]

Why was Byond still on my hard drive...

[Joseph Miles]

Thanks for the new bookmarked game site

[Mr. T]

If Toady doesn't want to, that's his prerogative. Personally, while I played BYOND first, I'm disappointed to know that Ginseng basically ripped the game from Toady, especially when I've known how good Gin is at making games. I thought Toady might want to know that somebody basically stole the idea, what he does with the information is not my concern. Still, it IS multiplayer, real-time, and has a lot of races to play as well, and it makes me wonder, if Toady worked out a system like that, Dwarf Fortress would be at a new level entirely. Also, the BYOND engine gives good clues as to how to utilize tilesets. Look at Mystic Journey, Failed Fate 0, Resident Evil Apocalypse, they are good examples of games, and their tilesets usage is great, from creating auto-aim sniper rifles in a real-time top-down view game, to flawless animations and even morphing powers. Also, add those games to your list if you're a BYOND fan...

[Tormy]

Hm this game is like DF, has multiplayer and tilesets?! I gotta try this out! 

[Mikademus]

I thought Toady might want to know that somebody basically stole the idea, what he does with the information is not my concern.

Well, you can't copyright ideas (regardless of what the abortion the American paten office has turned into is giving the impression of). Also, copying ideas is good because it allows refinement of a concept and constitutes evolutionary pressure that forces all competitors, including the original, to improve.

The thing is, even if a competitor (Dungeon Master, which btw still is a trademarked name) is functionally inferior, if it looks prettier it will still be more popular. And all that has been reading this forum for some time knows that two of the most wanted improvements to DF are presentation (graphics) and user interface.

[Symmetry]

It's odd that someone would remake DF with an even worse interface.  I can barely select and deselect units it's so laggy.

[Mr. T]

I think it's more the BYOND engine than the game itself that makes the lag. All the other games have lag, too. And the latest version of the game is worse than the previous one, along with a usually absent host, so I don't play it much anymore. Also, the combat system is much crappier, and the other players roleplay like idiots. Then they cry when I get annoyed and start killing off their adventurers...that almost makes up for the problems...almost.

[Tormy]

Hm Ive just tried this game...it could be interesting, but its quite slow at the moment, the interface is quite crap just like in DF now, the graphics is ugly [if it supports tiles, the developer should make a proper tileset, because as I see most of these images were made with ms paint in 10 minutes], the gameplay is not really fun either. The idea is good anyways, but the quality of the "product" is quite bad.

[MMad]

Direct link for anyone who's interested:
http://www.byond.com/games/Ginseng/DungeonMaster

[Stromko]

The interface in this Dungeon Master is much much worse I think, there's also quite a bit of latency. I can never tell what the hell my units are doing, there's a definite lack of feedback and information functions from what I can tell.

It's neat there's a multiplayer DF-alike out there, though they should do the honorable thing and mention DF. They still have their niche (multiplayer), but this BYOND Dungeon Master thing wouldn't exist if not for DF.

[Davion]

You'd think they'd at least give a shout out to Dwarf Fortress.

But it doesn't really surprise me, there's a Wesnoth rip-off on BYOND as well.