- cinematics play: `SMSG_TRIGGER_CINEMATIC` resolves through `CinematicSequences.dbc` → `CinematicCamera.dbc` → a `Cameras\*.m2` whose camera record is an eye path, a look-at path and a roll — cubic tracks with the full step / linear / Bézier / Hermite dispatch the bone loops collapse to step-or-linear (every shipped fly-by is Bézier), planted at the row's origin and facing (`Rz(+facing)`, checked against vmangos's own waypoint table: 8.5 yd mean on the human path, 154 with the other sign); FOV is per shot (the Undead intro authors 90°, the rest 45°), roll is authored around whole turns, the flight ends at the sequence band's end, a trigger arriving before the loading cover lifts is latched and started when it does, ESC skips through `CinematicFrame`'s own `OnKeyDown` (`StopCinematic` has zero native callers), and every path acks — natural end, ESC, or an unresolvable trigger immediately, as before; `.debug play cinematic <id>` replays any of them
- a cinematic hides the HUD — `UIParent:Hide()` reaches nothing here because the HUD frames are not its children, so the ALT-Z draw-level hide is used and the letterbox moves out of FrameXML onto Bevy UI nodes where that hide cannot reach it, recomputed per frame (bars only wider than 4:3, the picture cropped to 2:1) — and the restore only un-hides a UI this module hid
- a lit particle's normal is world up, one constant per draw, not camera-facing: Onyxia's always-on floor haze read about four times brighter from a level camera than from above because the shader dotted a to-eye normal against a fixed light; the reference uploads row 2 of the view matrix — world +Z carried into eye space — on every vertex and carries the light into the same frame, so the rotation cancels; 400 lit emitters (the waterfalls, chimney and campfire smoke, Westfall dust, Dun Morogh snow) stop brightening and dimming as you turn
- the `play` profile drops ThinLTO — rustc #86049 was intermittently poisoning the incremental link with `_anon.<hash>.llvm.<id>` symbols promoted by an earlier compile (48 unresolved across 7 codegen units; 1065 such symbols → 0 after) — and `benilla-formats` stops taking `image` with default features, which had been compiling a complete AV1 encoder into a crate that writes two PNGs: 499 → 466 workspace crates
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- water and lava keep time in the shader: the 24 Hz CPU tick that re-uploaded every liquid material is gone, −0.28 ms at the Stormwind gates, and lava scrolls smoothly instead of stepping
- static transform tracking is pinned on — the adaptive check spent two full scans a frame to say yes in a world where movers are 1–3% of the rows
- WOW_MEGA_STATIC merges static geometry per material and 133-yard cell — an experiment lever, priced at −1.15 ms CPU for +0.3 ms GPU at the Stormwind gates
- WOW_GPU_MS times the whole frame on the GPU and reads 2.2 ms against 17.4 CPU at the Stormwind gates: the frame is CPU-bound, so the work ahead is on the CPU side
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- an animated doodad is culled by its authored box, not its bind pose — the one-yard bird flying a 64-yard circuit stops vanishing with the camera angle — and the fix survives the engine's own bound recompute
- the logon proof answers the server's version challenge instead of sending zeros, so a strict realmd stops rejecting benilla as a modified client
- two instruments land: a frame-by-frame visibility trace for one model, and a probe that classifies whether a realmd enforces the version check
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Lua 5.0's generic-for and nested long strings are restored in a forked VM — 60 corpus addons stopped dying on one deleted opcode
- a day of demand-driven carving takes the 218-addon corpus from 24 addons surviving a session start to 114, with 144 loading without a single error
- Bagnon draws a real bag and answers real gestures — hover tooltip, pickup, use, drag — because our frames wear the reference's names, and the reference's own ContainerFrame.lua runs off the player's install instead of being transcribed
- the physics broad phase leaves: nothing in the client reads a contact, and it was measured at up to 41% of main-thread samples in real sessions
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- timed quests get their countdown — a Quest Timers box under the minimap and a Time Remaining line in the quest log, kept against the server's own clock
- interiors go honest: footsteps stop crunching the terrain's snow through a building's floor, and tavern voices are authored dry, so the fake cave echo is gone
- snow is the reference's again — point-sprite flakes at the era's pixel size, and a spawn slab that leans into your run so a runner no longer outruns the field
- Stormwind stops drawing Elwynn through its walls, a looted quest crate's lid settles, cold zones puff visible breath, and the collect-quest toast fires only on a real advance
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>
