- stealth reads as stealth now: the body fades to the reference's 30 % and creeps with the proper stealth walk and stand poses
- the item and enchant glow subsystem exists: permanent weapon glows and enchant visuals show in the world and at character select
- the character-select background's colour banding (the reported "16-bit" look) is fixed at the render target, and the tauren stage's black corners with it
- aura body tints got a real per-instance channel, so a spell can tint the whole unit without touching its neighbours
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- ground-targeted spells work end to end: press the button, get the targeting cursor, click the ground, and the cast ships on the wire the way the real client sends it
- a reticle sized to the spell's real radius rides the cursor, and on the click the storm model, falling shards and area sound all land at the point
- character screens: a newly created character comes back selected on the list, and the authored layout scales to small windows instead of clipping the bottom controls off
- blob shadows ride their receiver's clip transform and the raster bias that kept them faint is measured and fixed
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- terrain draws per chunk now, and one authority culls everything outside: buildings, billboard cards, particle emitters
- the fps and memory creep on long flights is fixed twice over: material animations only tick what something draws, and far-away art is released by distance (with a 30 s dwell floor so fast cameras don't thrash it)
- the second crash ever reported (a cast racing a despawning unit at flight speed) is fixed, with a regression test that reproduces the exact panic
- every build now prints which commit it is, so a bug report can say exactly what it ran
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Entering the world used to show an uncovered, movable world before the screen
came up — seconds of it on a slower machine ("like the Stormwind intro
video", as one report with video put it). The screen also cleared onto bare
terrain with the buildings still streaming in, and could hang forever if you
arrived swimming or flying. It has a real lifecycle now: it rises at the
entry edges (character pick, transfer, teleport), clears only when the scene
is actually presentable — terrain, buildings, props and their collision all
resident — and its physics hold releases in every movement mode, not just
walking. The progress bar counts buildings too.
- A far teleport flashed a frame of the destination before the screen rose.
The "swap never flashes" guarantee existed only in comments — a streamer
rework had silently dropped the scheduling constraint that enforced it; it
is structural now. And logout got its missing cover: the original's plain
black cut, not a frame of torn-down world.
- Animation parking now governs everything with a rig. ~350 animated objects
(braziers, doors, chests) were sampling their loops off-screen forever, and
a patrolling parked mob kept writing pose data nothing could read — ~620 rig
refreshes a frame became 7, and creatures in rooms the camera can't reach
through any portal park too.
- The engine's own tax got measured: bare Bevy spends ~3.9 CPU ms a frame on
this machine drawing nothing at all, which resets what "fast enough"
honestly means for everything built on top of it. A shipping build profile
(fat LTO) landed alongside — worth about −1 ms at the pin, kept out of
everyday builds.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- .cheat fly flies now. The find, read straight out of the 1.12 binary: there
is no flight mover at all. Flying is the swim mover plus one flag that stops
dry ground from cancelling it — the client's per-frame water check opens by
testing LEVITATING and bails before either arm can run. So you float where
you stand and aim-and-hold-forward to climb or dive, exactly like swimming.
Jumping breaches you out and you fall until you re-toggle: the original traps
the very same way, so ours does too.
- Clicking a creature's body selects it again. The skinning move one snapshot
ago left the picker reading the engine's old joint attributes — absent from
every mesh since — so only nameplates could select. It reads our attributes
now, and a test pins the picker to the same constants the meshes are built
with.
- A run that never connected to a server announces it in the log now. A "clean
run" in capture mode proves nothing about the packet path, and one of those
had already stood in for a live check once.
- The network apply loop's last inline handlers moved out beside their
families — same behaviour, one shape for all of them.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- An honest correction first: the previous snapshot's message announced the
owned skinning lane, but the code itself missed that snapshot by minutes —
two sessions landed at once and the export carried the older tree. The
skinning lane actually ships here, together with its follow-up.
- The follow-up is the bone-entity collapse. A creature's ~75-bone skeleton
existed as ~75 world entities, each paying transform propagation and
bookkeeping every frame, to serve the ~5 bones anything actually hangs off
(held weapons, glow emitters, the mount seat, overhead markers). A rig's pose
now lives in plain arrays on the model itself; only the consumer anchor
points remain as entities. At the crowded dungeon spot ~59,000 entities
became ~28,000 anchors (80k total → 50k), palette uploads coalesce into a
handful of writes, and another ~3 CPU ms came off the frame.
- The movement echo the server sends about your own character is applied now,
the way the original client always applied it — groundwork that GM flight
cashes in later today.
- The capture harness pins its clock per frame now, not just its frame count —
a slow run used to drift every animation out from under a golden image.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- The dungeon framerate reports were right about the mechanism: the cost is
CPU-side and it scales with NPC count, not with what's drawn. Two per-unit
lanes were each 30–100x more expensive than the work they do. Measured at the
reported Lower Blackrock Spire spot: 29.7 ms/frame, 72 CPU ms, before.
- "Which room is this NPC in" scanned whole dungeon groups triangle by
triangle — a spire stacks several 15k-face groups into any vertical column,
so 37 moving NPCs cost 1.2 million triangle tests per frame. Each group's
faces now sit in a column index built at load; same verdicts (pinned by
exactness tests), 88k tests, the lane drops from 11.3 ms to 1.1 ms.
- Animating one creature cost ~190 microseconds per frame in generic per-bone
animation machinery — hash lookups and boxed curves per bone, mostly to
produce constants. A direct pose evaluator now does the same math into the
same joints for ~16 microseconds per rig, checked bone-for-bone against the
old output across crossfades, overlays and masks. The reference animates
every in-range unit with no view cull, and now so can we: a raid's worth of
animating rigs (~450) costs ~4 CPU ms where it used to cost ~85.
- Net at the reported spot: a flat 60 fps. The performance probes also learned
to report CPU work (ms and %) instead of wall-clock fps, which is what makes
these numbers repeatable on a busy machine — and comparable to the Mac
report's own units.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Area triggers exist now, so portals work: every teleport pad, dungeon entrance
and enter-a-place quest volume reports the reference's own way — one exit latch,
first containing volume on the map wins, a sphere or a yawed box. Verified live:
Rut'theran to Darnassus, the Deadmines worldport, and a level-gated entrance
refusing with the server's own "You must be at least level 10 to enter."
- GameObjects animate. Every animated object arms its idle the moment it goes live
(doors and chests used to flash bind pose for a frame), a missing rest pose is
remapped the way the reference remaps it instead of playing nothing — the
Ahn'Qiraj gate's root tangle stood frozen for want of a Closed clip — and the
state machine covers the verified twenty of thirty-one object types instead of
three: fourteen hundred spawns' worth of traps, goobers, books and questgivers
now change pose off the wire.
- The flickering tent is still. Cloth you can see from both sides is authored as
two reversed copies of the same sheet, and the real client backface-culls each
copy from its wrong side so exactly one covers any pixel; we drew every building
batch two-sided, which left the winner to floating-point noise, flickering while
the camera crept. WMO materials now honor their cull flag.
- A sweep of long-standing visual bugs: effects respect the far-clip wall — a
ferry's deck lanterns were drawing from 7,000 yards away; the night-elf eye glow
goes out in first person instead of leaving two orbs burning in mid-air; the
goblins' stray white hair tuft is gone (a duplicated table key resolved last-wins
where the client scans first-wins); lava and slime finally have their own
submerged view — the dense fiery orange and dense green of the real thing, off
two fixed lighting rows nothing in the zone data points at; and the far-horizon
band overlaps the detailed terrain instead of leaving a strip of sky at lowered
view distance.
- Two caught at the keyboard: the backpack icon greys instead of vanishing while
the escape menu is up, and the world map is a real panel now — it can no longer
open over the menu, and ESC closes it first like everything else.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Duels. Challenge another player from their right-click menu, or with `/duel`, and
`/forfeit` to give it up. Both popups are there — the challenge you accept or decline, and
the warning when you leave the field — with the flag countdown between them, and the outcome
printed in chat when someone is knocked out or flees. Read off the reference client's own
duel packets and the three globals it keeps client-side, which is why the challenger reads
"You have requested a duel." even though the server never echoes that back.
- Inspect. Right-click a player and open their paper doll: their nineteen publicly visible
equipment slots with icon, name, quality and a linkable item, and their body standing in
the pane, which follows along if you retarget while the window is open. No stack counts and
no durability — those are not fields another player publishes, which is exactly why the
reference client's inspect doll has never shown them either.
- Water knows where it stops. Swimming used to trigger in the dry tunnel thirty yards under
Stormwind's canal, and in mid-air over Blackrock's lava. A liquid is now the grid the map
file actually stores — one wet flag per cell, and the surface height a bilinear over the
four corners of the cell you are standing in, the same sample the reference client takes —
so the water starts at the bank and its surface sits where your eye puts it. Lava is a
liquid you swim in, an indoor liquid asks the building you are inside, and `/liquid` prints
every surface claiming your feet and where each one came from.
- Creature parts authored to appear only on death — the voidwalker, the banshee, the ooze,
the stone elemental, the infernal — were drawing the whole time: material alpha now bakes
per animation sequence and the unit lane actually evaluates it. The character and inspect
model panes are lit by the reference widget's own single light instead of blowing out white,
the rotate arrows spin while you hold them, and the transparent sort ladder had its sign
backwards, so overhead names draw over water again instead of being painted out by a canal
behind them. Underneath, the protocol writer's 95-verb drawer and its thousand-line spell
module split into per-family files — no behaviour change, just a tree you can find things in.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
