Building the Windows Client

Prerequisites

• Visual Studio 2019+ (or Visual Studio Build Tools) with the C++ Desktop workload installed

Using build_client.bat

Open a command prompt in the repository root and run:

build_client.bat              # Build Release client (default)
build_client.bat debug        # Build Debug client
build_client.bat release      # Build Release client (explicit)
build_client.bat clean        # Clean all build artifacts

The script auto-detects your MSBuild installation via vswhere.exe. Build output is placed in bin_win32/.

Building the Anti-Cheat Driver (Windows)

Prerequisites

• Visual Studio 2019+ with the C++ Desktop workload
• Windows Driver Kit (WDK) matching your Windows SDK version

Build

The driver project is at source/src/anticheat/driver/phanticheat.vcxproj. Build it with MSBuild (x64 only):

msbuild source\src\anticheat\driver\phanticheat.vcxproj /p:Configuration=Release /p:Platform=x64

Or open the .vcxproj in Visual Studio and build from there. Output is placed in bin_win32/ as phanticheat.sys, alongside ac_client.exe.

Linux Server Deployment with Docker

Docker builds the server from source on Linux (Ubuntu 22.04) and runs it alongside a web monitoring dashboard.

Prerequisites

• Docker and Docker Compose

Architecture

docker compose starts two services:

Service	Port	Description
acserver	UDP 28763 (game), UDP 28764 (server info)	Game server
dashboard	TCP 8080	Web dashboard for live player stats and anti-cheat telemetry

Deploy (first time)

Build images and start both services in the background:

docker compose up -d

Verify the services are running:

docker compose ps

Configuration

Server config files live in the config/ directory and are bind-mounted into the container, so edits take effect without rebuilding the image. Key files:

File	Purpose
config/servercmdline.txt	Startup flags (port, max clients, MOTD, etc.)
config/maprot.cfg	Map rotation
config/serverpwd.cfg	Server and admin passwords
config/serverblacklist.cfg	IP blacklist
config/serverparameters.cfg	Runtime parameters (re-read every 60 s)

After editing config, restart the server to pick up the changes:

docker compose restart acserver

Redeploy (after code changes)

When you modify server source code, rebuild the images and restart:

docker compose up -d --build

To rebuild only a specific service:

docker compose up -d --build acserver    # rebuild server only
docker compose up -d --build dashboard   # rebuild dashboard only

Viewing Logs

docker compose logs -f              # all services
docker compose logs -f acserver     # server only
docker compose logs -f dashboard    # dashboard only

Server file logs are also persisted to the logs/ directory on the host.

Take Down

Stop and remove all containers:

docker compose down

To also remove the shared data volume:

docker compose down -v