Best wishes, this is really neat. I hope it won't get slaughtered by Roblox's legal team. A potential use-case might be to create a Linux-native client. The one used by most right now (Sober) is proprietary, after the previous (Vinegar) got shut down because of Linux haxxors.
> I hope it won't get slaughtered by Roblox's legal team.
I'm not saying Roblox won't try, but this project strikes me as very obviously legal.
If legality was a spectrum, I'd rank this higher than VLC Media Player (patents) and way above an NES emulator. I suppose it'd be below Android, and Oracle did sue over Android.
Emulators are unambiguously legal as long as the emulator author doesn't distribute copyrighted software without permission, and as long as no encryption is involved (recent action by Nintendo have made that bit a little unclear).
I don’t know of any country where emulation is illegal? Do you?
As the GP pointed out, OEMs use copyright and encryption to protect against unapproved execution. But that doesn’t apply to all systems.
Given countries like the UK and US have the strictest intellectual property and computer misuse laws, and emulation is legal there (bar the aforementioned caveats), I’d be surprised if there was a jurisdiction where emulation was illegal. However if you do know of somewhere then please do share.
To my knowledge emulation is illegal in Japan, as is modding consoles.
Edit: I looked into it a bit more. As it is against the law to dump ROMs from games you have legally purchased, as well as acquiring them through other channels, there is no way to emulate games in Japan in a legal manner.
People still make games for old consoles occasionally as hobby projects, and those are usually released freely as ROM files. I'm not familiar with Japanese law, but in most countries that would constitute a fairly solid proof that there are legal uses to which an emulator can be applied and thus that emulation itself isn't inherently illegal.
You’re talking about software piracy, which the UK and US, and most of the developed world too, also has strict laws for.
However new games are constantly released for old consoles and often sold as ROMs. Which is completely legal because they own the copyright and distribution rights to those games.
Also modern variants of old consoles will typically use emulation with ROMs approved for distribution, such as:
- The SNES Classic Mini
- The Wii Virtual Console
- The Switch Online, SNES
All of these are official Nintendo products. All of them available in Japan. And all of them use emulation under the hood with ROMs that Nintendo supply and have legal authority to distribute.
You can also take this point further and talk about uses of emulation outside of gaming too. Such as emulated hardware components in a virtual machine.
Curious what makes you say it'd be less legally dubious than an emulator? To me, it seems this would be at the same legality as the NES emulator because you're basically 'emulating' the environment Roblox game code runs in. To be fair if that intuition's correct it'd still be legal like emulators are if they're careful.
So long as the specific code used to implement a method is different, anyone is free under the Copyright Act to write his or her own code to carry out exactly the same function or specification of any methods used in the Java API. It does not matter that the declaration or method header lines are identical.
Emulators often require handling copyrighted materials like games or firmware, whereas APIs are not copyrightable.
The NES itself contains no code. Any NES emulator that ships with no software, or software under proper license (such as homebrew) is unambiguously legal. Does your PC, and the OS that drives it, suddenly become inherently illegal if you, as a user, installed pirated software? No, of course not.
Absolutely! It’s completely, unambiguously legal, which is why Google allows emulators on the Play Store.
Apple, beholden to copyright interests, is wary of software that allows even the possibility of copyright infringement. They just recently allowed video game emulators on their store.
It’s not a legal distinction, sure, but it’s also not apples to apples.
Nope! The system does include a CIC lockout chip, but emulators pretend it doesn't exist. The CPU immediately begins executing game code at power on. There is no BIOS or operating system, and indeed no fixed ROM inside the console at all.
No firmware, no microcode. The NES uses an old 8-bit CPU and a few custom chips; at the time, including firmware would've been too costly (think of the RAM and ROM!).
I want to be very clear that I'm not saying either VLC or emulators are illegal. I'm just saying, to the extent that it's possible to make a strained case that something is illegal, TFA strikes me as being on even firmer footing.
The supreme court ruled against oracle that an API cannot be copyrighted, but Roblox can still ban you for using an unofficial client (like discord does)
No, they ruled that the copyright on the API was valid, but that Google's infringement of it fell within the bounds of fair use. This was an enormous setback for free software potentially opening the doors for things like lawsuits against WINE for having too much of an impact on the Microsoft Windows market.
> No, they ruled that the copyright on the API was valid
No, they didn't. They very specifically did not rule on whether the API was protected by Oracle's copyright on Java.
> but that Google's infringement of it fell within the bounds of fair use.
They found that, even if the API was protected, Google's use would be within the scope of fair use, and therefore it was not necessary to decide the question of the underlying copyright.
Here is, in full, the opening paragraph of the decision:
Oracle America, Inc., is the current owner of a copyright in Java SE, a computer program that uses the popular Java computer programming language. Google, without permission, has copied a portion of that program, a portion that enables a programmer to call up prewritten software that, together with the computer’s hardware, will carry out a large number of specific tasks. The lower courts have considered (1) whether Java SE’s owner could copyright the portion that Google copied, and (2) if so, whether Google’s copying nonetheless constituted a “fair use” of that material, thereby freeing Google from copyright liability. The Federal Circuit held in Oracle’s favor (i.e., that the portion is copyrightable and Google’s copying did not constitute a “fair use”). In reviewing that decision, we assume, for argument’s sake, that the material was copyrightable. But we hold that the copying here at issue nonetheless constituted a fair use. Hence, Google’s copying did not violate the copyright law.
Yeah, but the difference is, the precedential weight of Federal Circuit decisions on copyright is about the same as the precedential weight of HN posts on copyright.
Had the case not been in the Federal Circuit because it used to have patent issues, and had the xase instead stayed in the Ninth Circuit and had that Circuit ruled that and the Supreme Court left that part of the decision untouched, there would be binding precedent, if only in the Ninth Circuit. But on issues other than its special ones (patents, in this case) the Federal Circuit is to apply precedent from the Circuit the case would otherwise be in, but does not create binding precedent.
So, other than between Oracle and Google themselves, the parties to the original case, as a matter of res judicata, the Federal Circuit decision isn't controlling on any future court the way a Supreme Court decision or even a decision of one of the geographic circuits would be.
I see. But don't circuit courts generally weigh each other's opinions rather highly, even if they aren't actually required to? And possibly a future vexatious litigant like Oracle might concoct some far-fetched patent claim to put some future lawsuit into the Federal Circuit as well?
No, it didn't. It also didn't rule in favor of Oracle that the Java was protected by the copyright on Java. It just ruled that Google's use of the parts of the API in reimplementing it would be Fair Use even if it was protected, and therefore there was no need to answer the question of whether it was protected.
(This may seem backwards because it is skipping over a more basic question to a question that should only matter after that has been answered, but the Supreme Court can answer questions in any order it chooses, and will often answer the question that is easiest [and least disruptive/impactful] to answer first even when it seems logically backwards, if that lets it not answer other questions.)
However this is an entirely different question. Whether or not an API is copyrightable, and whether you'd be in violation for recreating a proprietary API for the purpose of creating an (open-source) market alternative for their product, are entirely different questions to whether or not a specific private company has stopped serving specific customers due to use of software they do not authorize (which they are entirely in the right to do, legally)
This looks like it just reimplements a few Roblox APIs in an open source engine. It would of probably made more sense to just create a Roblox to Godot translator or something.
Second, your poking a multi billion dollar bear. If this project ever takes off Roblox will take action, right or wrong that's enough to stop most small projects. You can be right, but you don't have millions to fight non stop lawsuits.
In reality this is a cute proof of concept. It's never going to compete with the actual product. If it does Roblox will have it stopped in 72 hours
pokemon showdown is insanely and I mean insanely successful but it seems to have been almost blessed by the pokemon company.
I genuinely don't know how its legal, when I shared the link to pokemon showdown to one of my friends, his first thoughts was, wait how is this legal? This is such a good thing, I wonder why this is free. Only for me to tell it its open source and bro was flabbergasted to say the least.
You are wrong. Child predator activity is a priority for Roblox. Their corporate team has stated that if you investigate child predator activity, you will be banned immediately.[1][2]
The virtual world called Second Life, considered similar to Roblox, also has a rampant child predator problem[3]. It is interesting because Second Life and Roblox are similar 3D worlds. Both experiences have a similar visual feel. Both experiences do very little KYC, resulting in a rampant alt problem. In fact, Second Life will begin using the same version of Lua used by Roblox, so in some ways they are even technologically-related 3D experiences.
Does this increase local testability and thus QA-ability for roblox devs?
I was just looking at trying to get Lemur (archived) running in Lune in order to run jest tests running in a react-lua app the other day. I have a start at a test runner with optional in-game output, but getting jest tests to run at init in studio in order to not require run-in-roblox which doesn't yet work on Linux with vinegar flatpaks studio or vinegar in a devcontainer. It would save so much trouble if RobloxStudio.exe could take `--place game.rbxlx --script test_runner.lua --keep-open` args and regularly flush console output to a file.
I started to add loadPlaceFile to read an rbxlx to lemur and thought it probably the wrong place given that it's archived. TIL about Librebox, which can hopefully run tests with Jest with this stemgame react-lua app I've MIT licensed, in local CI too years later.
There is a hosted CI service for running Luau code in Roblox places.
Advantages to running tests locally: record screenshots and screencasts and save on test failure, immediate feedback, -i/--interactive drop into game session on test failure
can't find anything about the developers from the github repo.
their discord server is even stranger; there's absolutely nothing in the channels, and the only member with a developer role is an account dedicated to the "project".
looking at the source, work has absolutely been done - this isn't just a README - but it's still all a bit strange
I apologize if the first impression was crude -- I was in an hurry to get the engine out at this time. I understand that the Discord server simply consisted of a few channels (since then, I've cleaned that up).
I had actually wanted to make a new GitHub account for the project, to separate concerns (GitHub ToS prohibits this, and I had to learn the hard way), so I eventually renamed my old account. I'll make sure to provide more resources under my account so it doesn't seem empty.
In regards to developer attribution, we will have a developer page as well as a resource hub so it seems more than an "account". I had not anticipated that people would look deeper into the account -- I had simply wanted to get the demo out, to show the concept.
On a separate note, I acknowledge some people found it suspicious that the initial commit was every file at once. This doesn't mean I don't know how version control works. It was because I had actually worked on the project alone on my computer and, subject to release, released the full source at once.
Once again, thanks for informing us about these issues. Perhaps, I will better prepare my future releases to avoid this issues, even if I was under time constraints. I think that there are great things that can be accomplished with this project.
> On a separate note, I acknowledge some people found it suspicious that the initial commit was every file at once. This doesn't mean I don't know how version control works. It was because I had actually worked on the project alone on my computer and, subject to release, released the full source at once.
This is my standard operating procedure. My public repo's not going to start with the first hundred commits of the code in a different language, with API keys burned in, etc.
It did not occur to me this was rare enough to be suspicious. You shouldn't have to apologize for it :)
> I had actually wanted to make a new GitHub account for the project, to separate concerns...
Are you aware GitHub lets you create organisation accounts for collecting projects behind a common name? I think it might be what you were looking for. You can even turn your current account into an organisation.
My most charitable interpretation is that they are hiding their identities because they are afraid of any legal trouble, after all Roblox is an 81 billion organization.
There's a number of developers who get stuck on ROBLOX because they learned their creation tools when they were younger (they're easy to use and easily accessible to any desktop ROBLOX player), spent their formative years mastering their skills, and those skills turn out to be niche and not easily transferable to most other game engines. The choice is between basically restarting as a beginner in Unity, or continue making advanced creations on ROBLOX with all their friends and prestige they've earned in various sub-communities. To be honest I'm surprised it took this long for someone to try making an API-compatible alternative
Maybe the idea is that developers can release standalone versions of their Roblox games and escape the platform lock-in? Of course - whether their audience will come with them is a different question.
I have some kids into editing Roblox, and I'm a full time Unity / Unreal dev, and I would say that the Roblox editor and engine _are_ really good.
Kids don't care about fancy graphics, they care about connecting and running around with their friends, in a wide variety of games, that are downloaded and up and running within seconds.
The reason we chose to prioritize client support, then server, was replication. If we develop a strong client with broad support, it makes developing the replication piece easier, since the client already supports the features in mind. It would also allow us to make Librebox more practical for game development in its early stages.
We'd love to see how you could do the client-server model though. Perhaps, there is a new and more efficient way.
Makes total sense. It's even better for motivation of the developer. The offline client proves that it is possible to continue working on this huge project since it gives you "quick" feedback that you are making progress.
>If we develop a strong client with broad support, it makes developing the replication piece easier, since the client already supports the features in mind
Unless you are running the client against server, you will never know if the client features you are writing are any good.
The games need to run on the server by default, and the clients are just a "view" into what is happening on the server.
For ease of development, your app is a fully functioning server and a client in a single application.
When playing single player, the game is still running on a local server, with only a single client connected.
I strongly recommend building everything around the communication pipeline between the server and client. Make it very easy to dial up latency and packet loss.
There are a lot of free remakes of commercial games, and a lot of free remakes of commercial game platform engines. How do the developers of Librebox decide to work on this instead of:
- remaking one specific, good game on Roblox, such as remaking Bloxburg, in something more practical like Unity?
- working on an existing free remake of a Roblox game, like Nexus Battles, which of course, was archived?
- working on something else?
I’m asking the “Libreboxdevs.” It’s nice to hear these POVs directly from the developers. As you guys read this on a Saturday morning, consider that I’m not asking for, what features are going to be added to your GitHub project, or a comparison between Librebox and other game engines or whatever. I’m asking about your personal decision making.
This is pretty cool and brings back a lot of memories for me. When I was younger I remember building a clone of Roblox in C# with the Lua scripting engine part as well. I even ported some script builder scripts over to it (Player199 admin commands or something like that, can’t remember the name exactly)
This is fantastic! It is a very useful tool for preservation of games on Roblox. I hope this can be used for good to save the many creative and original works on the platform in a way that we didn't with flash games.
Roblox preservation has pretty much been a solved problem since around 2016. The clients all have built-in network servers and many people have built launchers to let you easily play a server with your friends. A lot of the knowledge is unfortunately gatekeeped inside Discord communities of crazy people but there are a few "good names" out there (Novetus is the big one)
To be honest this librebox project looks kinda fishy to me. Seems like the author never used version control before. They put everything into one commit [1] and are making changes to the repo using the Github web UI. I wish the dev the best of luck but I wouldn't be surprised if this project gets abandoned in a few months
Haha, thanks for telling me about that. Reflecting now, I feel that was a little goofy.
I was working on the project by myself in VS Code and, along with the demo, committed the entire source code on release. Future development will, of course, be used with version control. I'm also sharpening my version control skills.
I had simply done some quick changes with the web UI for language (and also to add more demo images later).
Not sure how this is correlated to the actual product though.
It's a tell, like in poker. Just saying you're inexperienced, that's all lol. Everyone gets their start somewhere and who knows maybe this ends up being huge.
No, but there's an ridiculous amount of programmers whose first language will have been Lua and have grown up with using first class functions and composition over inheritance from day one.
It's not the end of the world, it's a minor convenience and better than busy waiting.
There are plenty of cases where you want to manipulate an object but it's not guaranteed that it exists before your code is run. You get similar functionality with:
while not parentObj:FindFirstChild("childObj name") do wait() end
AFAIK, wait() is >= 1/30 of a second, if you wanted to be extra timely you'd instead run every heartbeat.
Programming doesn't make it easy to not miss jokes like that. I'll never forget my mum's face after I told her that I was working on a "killAllChildren" function when I was at school
OH PARDON ME BUT Y'KNOW WHY I AM GETTING SO EXCITED to talk in caps on HN?
Because I was on discord the other day and was talking about roblox and literally everyone hates it but people there were saying eh, we just play with friends we don't care, and I was like we definitely need to figure our shit since roblox doesn't give a (if I might swear since roblox disgusts me, but roblox doesn't give a fuck about child safety)
I was thinking of having roblox be sorta as the what'd you say, minecraft but less blocky.
So to me, an open world which can be modded till now was maybe creating a whole game (which imo is wrong approach for things like roblox) and to me the thing which made sense back then (2 weeks ago) was Luanti (formerly minetest) with custom mod and hosting the server.
I am so excited,so doped for this one man. Heck, I will build products for this and host them for free or maybe create jupyter python notebook scripts which can run the games don't worry. I want open source to succeed so badly in this genre just because of the safety aspect.
my bad, I hadn't seen the project and I think that the title might be changed or something or maybe it was my mistake but I felt like it was a completely original contender to games like roblox or maybe inspired by it like luanti (minetest) is to minecraft but still without necessarily having the same api's etc.
Seeing it now, It feels like a reimplentation project of sorts.
I was clearly excited wishing for a new approach but it seems not. Well, I feel like I should pardon because I had been completely unprofessional and my take was wrong. But yeah, on a satirical side please don't cancel me for making a wrong take lol (jk)
The Roblox debacle really reminds me of the 90’s where almost every arrested child predator was using AOL, but the news media would use the word “online service” or some really generic term as AOL spent so much money on advertising.
A 5 year old isn’t going to be using IRC after all.
Whether MIT-type licences give more freedom than copyleft is very disputable, since they make it extremely easy to lose. But you are right that terms like ‘free’ or ‘libre’ are in no way restricted to copyleft.
I think they're saying that "Libre" typically implies Copyleft, with a GPL or AGPL or MPL License. Something that (in some cases) forces you to make your changes available.
LibreOffice, for example, is Mozilla Public Licensed, which is a weak copyleft, like LGPL (I think).
Cool. There's an incredible amount of content created for roblox that's stuck on it currently.
Need to set free all that 'Club' content for sure.
Best wishes, this is really neat. I hope it won't get slaughtered by Roblox's legal team. A potential use-case might be to create a Linux-native client. The one used by most right now (Sober) is proprietary, after the previous (Vinegar) got shut down because of Linux haxxors.
> I hope it won't get slaughtered by Roblox's legal team.
I'm not saying Roblox won't try, but this project strikes me as very obviously legal.
If legality was a spectrum, I'd rank this higher than VLC Media Player (patents) and way above an NES emulator. I suppose it'd be below Android, and Oracle did sue over Android.
(Disclaimer, I am not a lawyer, etc.)
Emulators are unambiguously legal as long as the emulator author doesn't distribute copyrighted software without permission, and as long as no encryption is involved (recent action by Nintendo have made that bit a little unclear).
In all jurisdictions? What are the principal pieces of caselaw?
I don’t know of any country where emulation is illegal? Do you?
As the GP pointed out, OEMs use copyright and encryption to protect against unapproved execution. But that doesn’t apply to all systems.
Given countries like the UK and US have the strictest intellectual property and computer misuse laws, and emulation is legal there (bar the aforementioned caveats), I’d be surprised if there was a jurisdiction where emulation was illegal. However if you do know of somewhere then please do share.
To my knowledge emulation is illegal in Japan, as is modding consoles.
Edit: I looked into it a bit more. As it is against the law to dump ROMs from games you have legally purchased, as well as acquiring them through other channels, there is no way to emulate games in Japan in a legal manner.
People still make games for old consoles occasionally as hobby projects, and those are usually released freely as ROM files. I'm not familiar with Japanese law, but in most countries that would constitute a fairly solid proof that there are legal uses to which an emulator can be applied and thus that emulation itself isn't inherently illegal.
You’re talking about software piracy, which the UK and US, and most of the developed world too, also has strict laws for.
However new games are constantly released for old consoles and often sold as ROMs. Which is completely legal because they own the copyright and distribution rights to those games.
Also modern variants of old consoles will typically use emulation with ROMs approved for distribution, such as:
- The SNES Classic Mini
- The Wii Virtual Console
- The Switch Online, SNES
All of these are official Nintendo products. All of them available in Japan. And all of them use emulation under the hood with ROMs that Nintendo supply and have legal authority to distribute.
You can also take this point further and talk about uses of emulation outside of gaming too. Such as emulated hardware components in a virtual machine.
What about games that come on cd or dvd media? Some emulators can run directly from the disk without creating a rom.
You don't need to be doing something wrong to get crushed by legal fees.
Curious what makes you say it'd be less legally dubious than an emulator? To me, it seems this would be at the same legality as the NES emulator because you're basically 'emulating' the environment Roblox game code runs in. To be fair if that intuition's correct it'd still be legal like emulators are if they're careful.
(also not a lawyer)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America...
The NES itself contains no code. Any NES emulator that ships with no software, or software under proper license (such as homebrew) is unambiguously legal. Does your PC, and the OS that drives it, suddenly become inherently illegal if you, as a user, installed pirated software? No, of course not.
Absolutely! It’s completely, unambiguously legal, which is why Google allows emulators on the Play Store.
Apple, beholden to copyright interests, is wary of software that allows even the possibility of copyright infringement. They just recently allowed video game emulators on their store.
It’s not a legal distinction, sure, but it’s also not apples to apples.
No firmware, no microcode? It's all completely hard-wired?
(Genuine question, I've no idea what chips it uses or anything - was never rich enough to have a game console until I started work myself.)
Nope! The system does include a CIC lockout chip, but emulators pretend it doesn't exist. The CPU immediately begins executing game code at power on. There is no BIOS or operating system, and indeed no fixed ROM inside the console at all.
No firmware, no microcode. The NES uses an old 8-bit CPU and a few custom chips; at the time, including firmware would've been too costly (think of the RAM and ROM!).
VLC is French, so the US law on software patents doesn't apply to it.
I want to be very clear that I'm not saying either VLC or emulators are illegal. I'm just saying, to the extent that it's possible to make a strained case that something is illegal, TFA strikes me as being on even firmer footing.
The supreme court ruled against oracle that an API cannot be copyrighted, but Roblox can still ban you for using an unofficial client (like discord does)
No, they ruled that the copyright on the API was valid, but that Google's infringement of it fell within the bounds of fair use. This was an enormous setback for free software potentially opening the doors for things like lawsuits against WINE for having too much of an impact on the Microsoft Windows market.
> No, they ruled that the copyright on the API was valid
No, they didn't. They very specifically did not rule on whether the API was protected by Oracle's copyright on Java.
> but that Google's infringement of it fell within the bounds of fair use.
They found that, even if the API was protected, Google's use would be within the scope of fair use, and therefore it was not necessary to decide the question of the underlying copyright.
Here is, in full, the opening paragraph of the decision:
Oracle America, Inc., is the current owner of a copyright in Java SE, a computer program that uses the popular Java computer programming language. Google, without permission, has copied a portion of that program, a portion that enables a programmer to call up prewritten software that, together with the computer’s hardware, will carry out a large number of specific tasks. The lower courts have considered (1) whether Java SE’s owner could copyright the portion that Google copied, and (2) if so, whether Google’s copying nonetheless constituted a “fair use” of that material, thereby freeing Google from copyright liability. The Federal Circuit held in Oracle’s favor (i.e., that the portion is copyrightable and Google’s copying did not constitute a “fair use”). In reviewing that decision, we assume, for argument’s sake, that the material was copyrightable. But we hold that the copying here at issue nonetheless constituted a fair use. Hence, Google’s copying did not violate the copyright law.
Thank you for the correction. I clearly misremembered. It was the Federal Circuit that ruled that the API was copyrightable, not the Supreme Court: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf
Yeah, but the difference is, the precedential weight of Federal Circuit decisions on copyright is about the same as the precedential weight of HN posts on copyright.
Had the case not been in the Federal Circuit because it used to have patent issues, and had the xase instead stayed in the Ninth Circuit and had that Circuit ruled that and the Supreme Court left that part of the decision untouched, there would be binding precedent, if only in the Ninth Circuit. But on issues other than its special ones (patents, in this case) the Federal Circuit is to apply precedent from the Circuit the case would otherwise be in, but does not create binding precedent.
So, other than between Oracle and Google themselves, the parties to the original case, as a matter of res judicata, the Federal Circuit decision isn't controlling on any future court the way a Supreme Court decision or even a decision of one of the geographic circuits would be.
I see. But don't circuit courts generally weigh each other's opinions rather highly, even if they aren't actually required to? And possibly a future vexatious litigant like Oracle might concoct some far-fetched patent claim to put some future lawsuit into the Federal Circuit as well?
No, it didn't. It also didn't rule in favor of Oracle that the Java was protected by the copyright on Java. It just ruled that Google's use of the parts of the API in reimplementing it would be Fair Use even if it was protected, and therefore there was no need to answer the question of whether it was protected.
(This may seem backwards because it is skipping over a more basic question to a question that should only matter after that has been answered, but the Supreme Court can answer questions in any order it chooses, and will often answer the question that is easiest [and least disruptive/impactful] to answer first even when it seems logically backwards, if that lets it not answer other questions.)
For what it's worth, I don't think there is any known case of a Discord user being banned for using an unofficial client yet.
https://vencord.dev/faq/#Will-I-get-banned-for-using-Vencord...?
There have been cases and a whole project was shut down because of it https://github.com/Bios-Marcel/cordless?tab=readme-ov-file#i...
However this is an entirely different question. Whether or not an API is copyrightable, and whether you'd be in violation for recreating a proprietary API for the purpose of creating an (open-source) market alternative for their product, are entirely different questions to whether or not a specific private company has stopped serving specific customers due to use of software they do not authorize (which they are entirely in the right to do, legally)
Two factors are at play.
This looks like it just reimplements a few Roblox APIs in an open source engine. It would of probably made more sense to just create a Roblox to Godot translator or something.
Second, your poking a multi billion dollar bear. If this project ever takes off Roblox will take action, right or wrong that's enough to stop most small projects. You can be right, but you don't have millions to fight non stop lawsuits.
In reality this is a cute proof of concept. It's never going to compete with the actual product. If it does Roblox will have it stopped in 72 hours
> It would of probably made more sense to just create a Roblox to Godot translator
Its meant to be running live so you can play the many dynamic roblox games, I guess you could but it would be a mess.
The open source part is key. Plenty of online Pokemon and World of Warcraft clones out there, they can't seem to catch them all.
No need to. But anything too succesful should be ready to be brought down any moment.
pokemon showdown is insanely and I mean insanely successful but it seems to have been almost blessed by the pokemon company.
I genuinely don't know how its legal, when I shared the link to pokemon showdown to one of my friends, his first thoughts was, wait how is this legal? This is such a good thing, I wonder why this is free. Only for me to tell it its open source and bro was flabbergasted to say the least.
In practice, no society has ever overcome “might makes right.” Or, arguably, ever will.
The good news though; it’s lawyers shutting down your project. Yesterday, it was hiring someone to break your knees.
The Pirate Bay, SciHub.
The Internet interprets censorship (legal, moral, or otherwise) as damage, and routes around it.
No, that isn't how routing works on the internet. John was talking about Usenet. Usenet's routing does work that way.
That's how users work on the Internet.
and anyway, I heard Usenet is dead ;]
News at 11.
The actual piracy also existed, until it wasnt
It still does
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy_in_the_21st_century
I have a feeling projects like this rank higher on Roblox legal's priorities than does the rampant child predator activity on Roblox's platform.
You are wrong. Child predator activity is a priority for Roblox. Their corporate team has stated that if you investigate child predator activity, you will be banned immediately.[1][2]
The virtual world called Second Life, considered similar to Roblox, also has a rampant child predator problem[3]. It is interesting because Second Life and Roblox are similar 3D worlds. Both experiences have a similar visual feel. Both experiences do very little KYC, resulting in a rampant alt problem. In fact, Second Life will begin using the same version of Lua used by Roblox, so in some ways they are even technologically-related 3D experiences.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roblox_Schlep_ban_controversy
[2] https://corp.roblox.com/newsroom/2025/08/more-on-removal-of-...
[3] https://archive.is/yjprF (Feb 2024)
100%. Roblox will snuff this out immediately.
You need to make custom servers. In fact, make a server that patched official clients can connect to. That's the correct order of operations.
Does this increase local testability and thus QA-ability for roblox devs?
I was just looking at trying to get Lemur (archived) running in Lune in order to run jest tests running in a react-lua app the other day. I have a start at a test runner with optional in-game output, but getting jest tests to run at init in studio in order to not require run-in-roblox which doesn't yet work on Linux with vinegar flatpaks studio or vinegar in a devcontainer. It would save so much trouble if RobloxStudio.exe could take `--place game.rbxlx --script test_runner.lua --keep-open` args and regularly flush console output to a file.
westurner:lemur:patch_for_roblox_support: https://github.com/LPGhatguy/lemur/compare/master...westurne... .. new require() implementation in lune v0.10: https://github.com/lune-org/lune/issues/311#issuecomment-320...
I started to add loadPlaceFile to read an rbxlx to lemur and thought it probably the wrong place given that it's archived. TIL about Librebox, which can hopefully run tests with Jest with this stemgame react-lua app I've MIT licensed, in local CI too years later.
There is a hosted CI service for running Luau code in Roblox places.
"[Beta] Open Cloud Engine API for Executing Luau" https://devforum.roblox.com/t/beta-open-cloud-engine-api-for...
Advantages to running tests locally: record screenshots and screencasts and save on test failure, immediate feedback, -i/--interactive drop into game session on test failure
can't find anything about the developers from the github repo.
their discord server is even stranger; there's absolutely nothing in the channels, and the only member with a developer role is an account dedicated to the "project".
looking at the source, work has absolutely been done - this isn't just a README - but it's still all a bit strange
Hey, thanks for informing us about this.
I apologize if the first impression was crude -- I was in an hurry to get the engine out at this time. I understand that the Discord server simply consisted of a few channels (since then, I've cleaned that up).
I had actually wanted to make a new GitHub account for the project, to separate concerns (GitHub ToS prohibits this, and I had to learn the hard way), so I eventually renamed my old account. I'll make sure to provide more resources under my account so it doesn't seem empty.
In regards to developer attribution, we will have a developer page as well as a resource hub so it seems more than an "account". I had not anticipated that people would look deeper into the account -- I had simply wanted to get the demo out, to show the concept.
On a separate note, I acknowledge some people found it suspicious that the initial commit was every file at once. This doesn't mean I don't know how version control works. It was because I had actually worked on the project alone on my computer and, subject to release, released the full source at once.
Once again, thanks for informing us about these issues. Perhaps, I will better prepare my future releases to avoid this issues, even if I was under time constraints. I think that there are great things that can be accomplished with this project.
> On a separate note, I acknowledge some people found it suspicious that the initial commit was every file at once. This doesn't mean I don't know how version control works. It was because I had actually worked on the project alone on my computer and, subject to release, released the full source at once.
This is my standard operating procedure. My public repo's not going to start with the first hundred commits of the code in a different language, with API keys burned in, etc.
It did not occur to me this was rare enough to be suspicious. You shouldn't have to apologize for it :)
> I had actually wanted to make a new GitHub account for the project, to separate concerns...
Are you aware GitHub lets you create organisation accounts for collecting projects behind a common name? I think it might be what you were looking for. You can even turn your current account into an organisation.
https://github.com/settings/organizations
Skull emoji. Why the heck didn't I do that? Trust me, we're all learning.
I'll make sure to do that though as the next step.
One man shows be like that =(
My most charitable interpretation is that they are hiding their identities because they are afraid of any legal trouble, after all Roblox is an 81 billion organization.
Yeah but can I spend Robux on it? If not, pass.
The whole problem is Robux isn't it? It's not like the engine is anything special.
There's a number of developers who get stuck on ROBLOX because they learned their creation tools when they were younger (they're easy to use and easily accessible to any desktop ROBLOX player), spent their formative years mastering their skills, and those skills turn out to be niche and not easily transferable to most other game engines. The choice is between basically restarting as a beginner in Unity, or continue making advanced creations on ROBLOX with all their friends and prestige they've earned in various sub-communities. To be honest I'm surprised it took this long for someone to try making an API-compatible alternative
Maybe the idea is that developers can release standalone versions of their Roblox games and escape the platform lock-in? Of course - whether their audience will come with them is a different question.
Maybe this can be used as a way to archive a Roblox game?
I'm not really a Roblox player so I'm not sure.
I haven't used them (and I despise Roblox) but my understanding is that the Roblox creation tools are actually pretty good.
I have some kids into editing Roblox, and I'm a full time Unity / Unreal dev, and I would say that the Roblox editor and engine _are_ really good.
Kids don't care about fancy graphics, they care about connecting and running around with their friends, in a wide variety of games, that are downloaded and up and running within seconds.
> Librebox is currently in demo stage (it implements a limited subset of the Roblox API
Probably worth mentioning this is just a demo. There's a looooong list of API features that aren't implemented (most notably servers and networking)
I would start with the servers and networking if I were them. It can be really hard to bolt that on later.
Good point. We thought about this in advance.
The reason we chose to prioritize client support, then server, was replication. If we develop a strong client with broad support, it makes developing the replication piece easier, since the client already supports the features in mind. It would also allow us to make Librebox more practical for game development in its early stages.
We'd love to see how you could do the client-server model though. Perhaps, there is a new and more efficient way.
Makes total sense. It's even better for motivation of the developer. The offline client proves that it is possible to continue working on this huge project since it gives you "quick" feedback that you are making progress.
Good luck guys!
>If we develop a strong client with broad support, it makes developing the replication piece easier, since the client already supports the features in mind
Unless you are running the client against server, you will never know if the client features you are writing are any good.
The games need to run on the server by default, and the clients are just a "view" into what is happening on the server.
For ease of development, your app is a fully functioning server and a client in a single application.
When playing single player, the game is still running on a local server, with only a single client connected.
I strongly recommend building everything around the communication pipeline between the server and client. Make it very easy to dial up latency and packet loss.
There are a lot of free remakes of commercial games, and a lot of free remakes of commercial game platform engines. How do the developers of Librebox decide to work on this instead of:
- remaking one specific, good game on Roblox, such as remaking Bloxburg, in something more practical like Unity?
- working on an existing free remake of a Roblox game, like Nexus Battles, which of course, was archived?
- working on something else?
I’m asking the “Libreboxdevs.” It’s nice to hear these POVs directly from the developers. As you guys read this on a Saturday morning, consider that I’m not asking for, what features are going to be added to your GitHub project, or a comparison between Librebox and other game engines or whatever. I’m asking about your personal decision making.
This is pretty cool and brings back a lot of memories for me. When I was younger I remember building a clone of Roblox in C# with the Lua scripting engine part as well. I even ported some script builder scripts over to it (Player199 admin commands or something like that, can’t remember the name exactly)
Good times
This is fantastic! It is a very useful tool for preservation of games on Roblox. I hope this can be used for good to save the many creative and original works on the platform in a way that we didn't with flash games.
>in a way that we didn't with flash games
I thought Flashpoint[1] did pretty well about that? The full download is 1.68TB, I'd wager most stuff you'd have seen back then would be on there.
[1]https://flashpointarchive.org/
Roblox preservation has pretty much been a solved problem since around 2016. The clients all have built-in network servers and many people have built launchers to let you easily play a server with your friends. A lot of the knowledge is unfortunately gatekeeped inside Discord communities of crazy people but there are a few "good names" out there (Novetus is the big one)
Thanks for that info.
To be honest this librebox project looks kinda fishy to me. Seems like the author never used version control before. They put everything into one commit [1] and are making changes to the repo using the Github web UI. I wish the dev the best of luck but I wouldn't be surprised if this project gets abandoned in a few months
[1] https://github.com/librebox-devs/librebox-demo/commit/e70ea3...
Haha, thanks for telling me about that. Reflecting now, I feel that was a little goofy.
I was working on the project by myself in VS Code and, along with the demo, committed the entire source code on release. Future development will, of course, be used with version control. I'm also sharpening my version control skills.
I had simply done some quick changes with the web UI for language (and also to add more demo images later).
Not sure how this is correlated to the actual product though.
It's a tell, like in poker. Just saying you're inexperienced, that's all lol. Everyone gets their start somewhere and who knows maybe this ends up being huge.
Are the majority of programmers currently Roblox programmers? I think they might be.
No, but there's an ridiculous amount of programmers whose first language will have been Lua and have grown up with using first class functions and composition over inheritance from day one.
Well, you can inherit in Lua, right? In http://lua-users.org/wiki/InheritanceTutorial it's just
because __index can be a table; it doesn't have to be a function.I've never tried Roblox, so I have no idea how often people do such things in it.
Can we expect a clone here, like Mine Test for Minecraft?
>missing :WaitForChild()
That's good... isn't it?
It's not the end of the world, it's a minor convenience and better than busy waiting.
There are plenty of cases where you want to manipulate an object but it's not guaranteed that it exists before your code is run. You get similar functionality with:
while not parentObj:FindFirstChild("childObj name") do wait() end
AFAIK, wait() is >= 1/30 of a second, if you wanted to be extra timely you'd instead run every heartbeat.
"Popular kids game Roblox faces pressure over allegations of child predators on its platform":
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/shows/t...
I read your comment carefully to see whether you've taken the GP's joke further, but alas :)
Ha, yeah. Sailed right over my head. It's really too bad. Both about the what the platform has become and the missed setup.
Programming doesn't make it easy to not miss jokes like that. I'll never forget my mum's face after I told her that I was working on a "killAllChildren" function when I was at school
OH PARDON ME BUT Y'KNOW WHY I AM GETTING SO EXCITED to talk in caps on HN?
Because I was on discord the other day and was talking about roblox and literally everyone hates it but people there were saying eh, we just play with friends we don't care, and I was like we definitely need to figure our shit since roblox doesn't give a (if I might swear since roblox disgusts me, but roblox doesn't give a fuck about child safety) I was thinking of having roblox be sorta as the what'd you say, minecraft but less blocky.
So to me, an open world which can be modded till now was maybe creating a whole game (which imo is wrong approach for things like roblox) and to me the thing which made sense back then (2 weeks ago) was Luanti (formerly minetest) with custom mod and hosting the server.
I am so excited,so doped for this one man. Heck, I will build products for this and host them for free or maybe create jupyter python notebook scripts which can run the games don't worry. I want open source to succeed so badly in this genre just because of the safety aspect.
What?
my bad, I hadn't seen the project and I think that the title might be changed or something or maybe it was my mistake but I felt like it was a completely original contender to games like roblox or maybe inspired by it like luanti (minetest) is to minecraft but still without necessarily having the same api's etc.
Seeing it now, It feels like a reimplentation project of sorts.
I was clearly excited wishing for a new approach but it seems not. Well, I feel like I should pardon because I had been completely unprofessional and my take was wrong. But yeah, on a satirical side please don't cancel me for making a wrong take lol (jk)
This is some fine repository.
The Roblox debacle really reminds me of the 90’s where almost every arrested child predator was using AOL, but the news media would use the word “online service” or some really generic term as AOL spent so much money on advertising.
A 5 year old isn’t going to be using IRC after all.
This is about an open source coding project
Is it an accident that they are releasing an open source Roblox, when the for profit company is becoming such a pariah in the news this week?
I’ve heard more about Roblox and their poor position on child safety this week than total mentions of roblox for years.
You should rename the project to OpenBox if you are not using a copyleft license. It is not libre.
Libre means free. MIT gives more freedom than copyleft.
Whether MIT-type licences give more freedom than copyleft is very disputable, since they make it extremely easy to lose. But you are right that terms like ‘free’ or ‘libre’ are in no way restricted to copyleft.
French native here. Libre means free in the sense of freedom, not in the sense of free as in free beer (the term for that is “gratuit”)
I think they're saying that "Libre" typically implies Copyleft, with a GPL or AGPL or MPL License. Something that (in some cases) forces you to make your changes available.
LibreOffice, for example, is Mozilla Public Licensed, which is a weak copyleft, like LGPL (I think).
It's just silly gatekeeping. E.g. LibreSSL is permissively-licensed and is from 2014.
Yeah fair enough. Pedantry about names can get silly.
I mean, is it not 'Libre' to use the word 'Libre' in the name?