- from inside a building the open-world water outside draws only through a doorway you can see, as terrain and trees already did — the Caverns of Time lake is gone from the cavern's ceiling: there was never a second visibility lane for open-world liquid (the old deferral said "it already has an authority"; a sweep of every visibility writer found none, so Bevy's frustum test was the lake's only gate), an ADT liquid layer is tagged exterior scene at spawn and the existing window cull owns it, one 33 yd chunk layer at a time — which the reference's bytes then confirmed is its unit too (`CChunkLiquid`, reachable only from the per-window walk, a sealed room's supply discarded not deferred); a building's own pool also rides the Map Objects toggle now, so switching buildings off no longer leaves the canals hanging in the air
- the Thunder Bluff elevators and every other Kalimdor lift were invisible for the whole session whenever you logged in on that continent: the lift arm snapshotted the current map one stage before the login frame had written it, so every lift compared itself against map 0 and hid as off-map — a lift carries no map at all now (it is only ever streamed to players standing on its own map), the off-map term stays for the boats it was written for, and `WOW_LIFT_CENSUS` prints each transport's arm state, cycle and visibility (13 transports, 11 hidden → 0)
- the lightning across Razorgore's room and Chain Lightning's mob-to-mob hop drew as hairlines: the chain renderer took each hop's cross-section as the world-horizontal perpendicular, where the reference takes `(−d.y, d.x, 0)` in eye space — the ribbon is view-plane aligned and keeps its authored 2 × halfWidth yards at every angle, so a long level beam watched from its own plane no longer thins to a line (the "a hop seen end-on genuinely collapses" note was wrong and is gone)
- a display that names a model builds even when it draws no batch — Naxxramas' Unholy Axe / Swords / Staff are an invisible stalker holding a Monster weapon, and the held weapon had nowhere to hang; the same gate was keeping 43 emitter-only GameObjects dark (house and blacksmith smoke, Ironforge's lava steam, Stratholme's embers, every firework), and a name sits at the authored PlayerName attachment instead of at the feet; and a vendor's foot-shuffle on turning to you now blends the whole way in and runs to its own clip window — a 500 ms step on 1100 of 1130 shipped shuffle records — where the latch had tested the gap left against a band sixty times too wide, and nothing ever ended the step
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- the pale lines through the speech bubble were its backdrop atlas bleeding across its own slices under magnification; the slices now inset, verified per row against the real backdrop bytes
- a bubble that never appears can say why: all seven silent refusals report themselves under the bubble trace
- the invisible trigger creature goes invisible at last — there is no server flag to consume; its model is authored empty, and the black slab people kept meeting was our own placeholder cube. a display that names a model now draws exactly what that model builds, including nothing
- a census probe lists which streamed entities are standing as placeholder cubes, and on which displays
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- a player build ships beside the dev one — dev chords and probe surfaces go dark, and a gate enforces what a player can still reach, by medium not by module
- the binary carries its own shaders and its shipped UI, finds the WoW folder by itself, and keeps its local state in one benilla-config folder
- the glue screens get a capture shutter, and the engine stops depending on the protocol crate
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>
- the beam is on screen: Chain Lightning arcs outward hop by hop and Drain Life ropes from hand to victim — a write-order edge was erasing the finished geometry every frame, and a tripwire now guards the whole class
- the Controls page lands (sticky targeting, auto loot, invert mouse), UI scale waits for the era Apply button, and the terrain-distance slider retires
- with auto-loot in effect a lootable corpse shows the triple-pouch cursor, the real client's tell
- the character-screen freeze before a loading screen is gone: the shader warm-up hides behind a fully presented cover and tears down only its own roots
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- a building's transition corridors carry the reference's bright-doorway fade: the black tunnel between sunlit outside and a lit interior is gone
- the Options window gets its first real pages: seven 1.12 sound rows on Audio and the two 1.12 Video Options sliders on Graphics, all live CVars
- terrain culls like the real client: the ground is one-sided, so from underneath you see through it exactly as 1.12.1 does
- the beam system's data plane lands: 48 live chain, drain and funnel beams read off the real patch chain, with a byte-exact wire golden — the renderer follows
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- The keyring is built. Your first key makes the keyring button appear by
the bags, opening the window the original keeps its dungeon keys in — the
server had been sending the keys all along; nothing had ever shown them.
- Keys open their doors now. The client used to cast the open as a bare
spell, which the server rightly refuses; it now sends the item-use the
original sends, carrying which key from which slot. The tooltip plays
along: "Locked" turns the soft green when something you carry opens it,
and a key stops inventing a "Use: Opening" line it never had.
- A building can own the sky: a WMO can name its own painted skybox, and
Stratholme's burning city now draws its near-black-to-red dome instead of
the zone's khaki gradient. The exact rule for when it applies settles in
the next snapshot.
- Signpost tooltips follow the cursor again — the tooltip anchor forks per
object class, corner for doors, cursor for signs — and the Blasted Lands
lightning stops striking the same spot for ever: a placed doodad re-rolls
its animation variation every play-window, like the original.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Twenty of the game's forty-three maps are not made of terrain at all — Molten
Core, Onyxia's Lair, Dire Maul, Gnomeregan, Uldaman, the Deeprun Tram and both
Blackrocks among them. Their whole world is one building named by the map file,
and that line was being thrown away, so those maps loaded nothing and a teleport
in fell forever. The building is now placed as an ordinary WMO placement — so
collision, props, liquid, interior lighting and portals all come along on the
existing path — verified on seven of the twenty against the server's own
independent floor heights.
- Particles keep the model's time. Emitter rate and on/off now bake per animation
sequence and follow the clip that is actually playing, so a quest object's
explosion choreography no longer burns at full roar while the object idles. And
the flipbook cell ramp is computed the way the reference computes it: sheets
that play backwards no longer crash the client (a certain Winterspring brazier
fired this on every approach), the tail streak reads its own ramp instead of the
head's, and the per-segment repeat count works — the Insect Swarm's wings
finally flap.
- A culled dungeon room takes its furniture with it: lanterns, crates, barrels and
cobwebs now cull with the WMO group that owns them, instead of hanging lit in
the void where their room used to be. The group's own liquid goes along too.
- Under the floor: the archive chain pins that a file the patch deletes can never
fall through to the stale copy in a base archive — a silent failure mode that
would serve deleted content looking perfectly healthy.
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>
