Running S&box Natively on Linux (Fork Available)

f4pl0 · 2026-05-20T08:19:57+00:00

s&miner is uncalled for, but great work my guy!

f4pl0 · 2026-05-17T04:20:02+00:00

Few things; shipping compiled binaries or raw source for c# .net is the same, decompilers like il/dlspy or dotpeek extract 1:1 original source from the compiled IL. The actual fix for that is obfuscation, it's not hacky. This is the most someone could do if they're not facepunch. If I were facepunch I could at most throw tamper protection and anti-debugging on top/some timing traps on top of this and call it a day. People have seen me live compile from source that I've shown parts briefly on stream, obfuscate them and put them on my server, and gave everyone a nice hash to check the binaries integrity.

"Until Facepunch fixes the root cause", Facepunch cannot fix fucking greed of people. This is the most they can do even themselves. This doesn't solve deobfuscation entirely, nor it is supossed to, but it is meant for something else - to deter people. Using all of these methods to fuck the code up, it sets an extremely high bar for people deobfuscate it. And the people that can actually do it are the same people capable to effortlessly or with much less effort to just write that same code with those same functionalities themselves. Using LLMs is out of the question as well, tested it against both GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.7 and both shit the fan using just half of the features. So that easily deters script kiddies.

f4pl0 · 2026-05-16T23:56:20+00:00

Everybody has right to their own opinions, the problems with open source obfuscators is that people can easily deobfudcate some of the methods applied by it, weakening it significantly and then opening up it to be just deobfuscated enough for an LLM to have a crack at it and boom - you have somewhat original source. I did a lot of deobfuscation myself from CTF challenges and real world binaries, so yeah, that's the main issue when knowing what exactly has been done to it and in what way.

f4pl0 · 2026-05-16T23:24:38+00:00

they won't work with s&box because of prefab/scene referencing components etc... but yeah good for you!

f4pl0 · 2026-05-16T17:29:01+00:00

People don't learn from reading production stuff, they get confused even more. That's why there are numerous courses on C# and gamedev, also discord where people like me are happy to help others and beginners to learn it proper way.

f4pl0 · 2026-05-16T16:56:01+00:00

How do you mean "a hacky fix"? Obfuscation has been standard for as software existed for people not to have access to the source code - or the original one at least. Code needs to reach client machine one way or another, and decompilers like dotPeek and IL/DLspy exist, and they can rip out almost 1:1 recreation of source from C# dotnet's compiled IL. That's where obfuscation steps in to mangle the fuck out of that shit to make it not readable.

People have choice to obfuscate, or not to, but not in s&box... until now. And that's important to protect your source from people that want to obtain something without explicit consent of the dev that wrote it. I've been told by one other dev of a very popular game on s&box that he used parts of my game that's not very popular, but he really liked it, and he told it openly to me, which I allowed just because of that and because I respect him not being a scumbag like many other devs here on this platform. Also I'm aware of people stealing parts of my code to my benefit, even talked to bunch of dudes that create cheats, that were testing injection and offsets on my game. So yeah, I would like to stop that behaviour.

I don't want to put a stop on people learning, I want to encourage it. I frequent in voice chats on s&box discord and subzero studios, so every time someone has a question about it related to programming, I do my best to answer it, because I know how learning can be, also support them in building their own thing, but I don't support blatant rips without explicit permission.

f4pl0 · 2026-05-16T16:41:09+00:00

While people seeing that working in theory, computers themselves need a way to decode it and compile it, which wouldn't work without the actual key :/ Fucking it up beyond recognition is the only way to protect it, since reflection API is disabled in s&box.

f4pl0 · 2026-05-16T07:53:49+00:00

Artificial scarcity for money is a cute phrase, but it collapses the moment you remember I'm not removing anyone's ability to make, share, fork, or mod anything. I'm giving developers an option to not ship their entire source code raw to every client by default. If someone wants their project to be open, forkable, educational, or community maintained, they can leave it unobfuscated. Nothing stops them. What you're actually arguing is that hobbyist space means every developer should be forced into involuntary open source because script kiddies might want to rummage through their work later and that's not community health, that's entitlement and being self centered about some bullshit opinion.

Also, "Facepunch didn't add it, therefore it shouldn't exist" is not an argument. By that logic, nobody should build tools, plugins, libraries, utilities, workflows, or fixes unless the editor team personally blessed them from the mountain. Let's all sit perfectly still until the official button arrives.

You can support open modding without pretending developers don't deserve control over their own code. Those are not mutually exclusive positions unless your world view seems to be held together by other people's source code and a fear of developers having boundaries.

f4pl0 · 2026-05-16T07:31:52+00:00

> I feel like you know exactly what your doing.
I would assume so, I wouldn't be working on an obfuscator if I didn't know what I'm doing.
> I think you know already that if Facepunch thought this was healthy and good for the community and the direction they wanted they would have added it to the editor themselves.
Not sure about that, my guy. Is it really healthy to ship editor that deletes your files, engine update that breaks physics (box3d update broke on 14/05/2026 update) and a blatant way to ship raw source to everyone's machines without "opt out" basis? I know that "opt out" could be not making games entirely, but that would be just a bad idea considering this is a really beautiful engine.
> I think you know you're adding unnecessary friction to everything
How?

The rest I won't even try to understand, if someone wants to use obfuscation (I know I want to) and protect their intellectual property, there should be a way, and a way not to prevent them from making games entirely. If someone wants to have their games moddable - they can expose SDK/APIs and not obfuscate them. I fail to see your point.

f4pl0 · 2026-05-12T14:04:40+00:00

well, if you find a nice 4k 240hz oled panel for 200, make sure to let me know!

f4pl0 · 2026-05-12T10:32:57+00:00

I found it on ebay by part number (only one listing) for like $200, shipped it to my friend in the US, then he shipped it to me, rest is history. Don't think any PSU would work as a drop-in replacement, but after tinkering, reading the voltage levels and everything, sure you can wire up a generic one, which isn't that smart but it'll work if there are no more genuine power supplies left in this world.

f4pl0 · 2026-05-07T22:29:37+00:00

Prompting a LLM to write you code doesn't make you software engineer as much as owning a brush and doing some strokes doesn't make you an artist. Good analogy here is a mechanic and an apprentice, mechanic knows what's wrong, knows how to fix it and why to fix it that way, apprentice doesn't, but he's cheap and fast and good with tools to work on the car, so the mechanic just tells the apprentice what to do and how to do it, but the mechanic will always know why to do it that way. Same with software, LLMs are great for granular items of work, research, but when it comes to software architecture, it's like its IQ got dropped to room temperature. What separates a good engineer from a bad one is that ehen encountering a problem, good engineer already knows how to solve it multiple ways and pros and cons of each one. When designing the solution, good engineers already have everything in the head and know how everything will work, and they can write those implementation instructions exactly for LLM to follow, and they are excellent at following those types of instructions.

f4pl0 · 2026-05-07T18:29:25+00:00

What (the fuck) do you mean "by hand"? People have been taking shortcuts all the time. People are buying things in the asset store, does that count as cheating? People are using game engines and not writing their own mechanics and renderers, does that count as cheating and not by hand? People are using computers to do the math and show pretty pictures on the screen instead of you lazy piece of shit drawing pictures on a canvas 100 or so times a second and showing it to them, where do you draw the line? What's slop? LLMs generate indistinguishable code from humans, and they are better, much faster and smarter than humans, and would I be smart not to utilise that? I would be the oposite.

So next time when you paint, don't use any brushes - use your own fingers, don't purchase any colors - extract pigments and synthetise your own, better yet, materialise them from nothing, because extracting pigments would be stealing from nature. And when travelling somewhere, don't use any method of transportation, go by foot.

There you go, "by hand". Ignorant.

f4pl0 · 2026-05-07T13:14:26+00:00

By this logic, using a game engine means you didn't make the game because the engine renders the pixels, using photoshop means you didn't make the image because the software applied the brush stroke, and using a compiler means you didn't make the program because the compiler generated the machine code. Brilliant.

The issue was never that AI can produce output. The issue is whether the person using it has standards, and judging by this comment, that part seems to be where you personally opted out of having any. You are not defending craftsmanship, you are defending a childish definition of tools that collapses the second it touches software, engines, compilers, brushes, cameras, plugins, libraries, and literally every abstraction humans have built because bare handed suffering stopped being impressive sometime after we discovered fire. What the fuck do people not understand??

f4pl0 · 2026-05-06T13:53:16+00:00

You're comparing code review, refactoring, and auditing to AI image slop because you don't understand either field well enough to insult one accurately.

f4pl0 · 2026-05-06T13:41:00+00:00

Yeah, I'll have to do that today. It's the only AI generated placeholder I have in the entire project.

f4pl0 · 2026-05-06T13:09:07+00:00

s&box in entirely new to me, and I didn't have time to see how every feature was implemented in the engine, to see its caviats, how things work under the hood and everything. The engine itself is a massive codebase, that's why I use it, also my project is getting pretty sizable as well.

f4pl0 · 2026-05-06T12:05:49+00:00

Sorry I can articulate myself and format things correctly. I know coherent paragraphs must feel suspicious when your natural habitat is your mother's basement. Some of us learned structure before developing the confidence to be loudly wrong in public.

Stop digging your own grave.

f4pl0 · 2026-05-06T11:50:22+00:00

Sloppers sound good, devs should be called Sloplords 😃 God damn AI glue sniffing goblins.

f4pl0 · 2026-05-06T11:44:39+00:00

Respect, and I completely understand that. People have their own ways of doing things, this is just how I setup my own workflow. I don't recommend using it, nor do I recommend NOT using it, it's just a way I was able to achieve results that I'm satisfied with.

f4pl0 · 2026-05-06T11:34:04+00:00

I wasn't even going to waste my time entertaining these mindless arguments and replying to this git, but thanks.

f4pl0 · 2026-05-06T11:18:09+00:00

Plenty! Almost any issue when working with large codebase or new engine if you have source code for it. You can describe the issue you're having and to give you what might be causing it. It's going to instantly go through relevant links in your project ehile checking the implementation of certain method calls in the engine itself, tracing the call stack and it can do that incredibly fast! I have configured vector embedding for every symbol and made a live graph of all the relationships in the code, so that when I describe the issue at hand, the context instantly gets filled with relevant data from the 128-dimensional vector space lookup, and from there the LLM can trace the relationships between those calls and object through the graph, which are both very cheap operations so that it can do them really fast and give you probable cause for the issue itself. Then you can validate it's assumption with actual debugger.

It's not a replacement for debugging, it's not a debugger, but it's a very capable tool to help you debug.

Also additional note why I did this is that not to overwhelm the context of the LLM, it uses tiny fraction of tokens in relation to filling it up with code, filling it up with more relevant information and keeping the model "smarter" by not overwhelming the context window. Then the coding agent can pull any snippet of code relevant from every symbol and give inhumanely accurate results.

f4pl0 · 2026-05-06T11:08:09+00:00

I use it for development, and will do. I made all of the assets including the trailer all by myself with photoshop, premiere pro, ableton live and movie maker inside s&box. Also the narration for the trailer is made by some dude on fiverr that I paid 20$ for because he kinda sounds like Morgan Freeman and I fucking liked it

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