- a hunter's or warlock's pet has its action bar now: attack, follow, stay, the pet's own spells with cooldowns and autocast sparkles
- the macro system lands: the macro window, the icon chooser, /cast and /macro, and macros dragged onto the action bar
- hunter shots look right at last: the bow draws and releases on the shot, and the arrow lays a spark trail its whole flight
- the options window re-dresses in 1.12's own art with the classic dialog look, and gets a working search box and clickable steppers
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- lava renders outside Blackrock at last: the mesher was dropping every open-world lava and slime surface, and 28 river mouths get their missing sea back in the same sweep
- Undercity's broken corridor returns, geometry and color both: a one-byte file overrun dropped the whole room, and a paint job one record short was being thrown away entire
- collision goes one-sided like the real client: walls stop you from the front and let you pass from behind
- the Booty Bay entrance is wood and rope again instead of a black cutout, glass picks up a real reflection, and models far from the map's center stop trembling
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>
- one era-style Options window: window chrome, category list, search box and its own ESC rung, with the game menu reshaped to match
- settings are real CVars now: GetCVar/SetCVar reach Lua, and your changes persist as a diff in benilla/config.toml
- all local state lives in one visible benilla/ folder beside your Data/ — nothing hides in platform config dirs
- UI text stays crisp at any scale and survives a mid-session resolution change: glyphs measure in the environment they raster in
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- the GCD system now matches the real client end to end: opening a chest no longer eats the running global cooldown, and a running sweep's start stops wobbling between frames
- the mounted left shoulder's wild swing is fixed at the bone: a bone flagged to ignore its parent's rotation now does, decided before any camera-facing runs
- a gameobject effect with several animation sequences plays the right one: Molten Core's rune flame spreads and dances instead of collapsing into a bright dot
- the targeting cursor asks the thing under it and greys by default like the real client, and the ground-target reticle keeps its own location rules
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- the loading screen now compiles every shader the world can reach: sky, water, spell shards and model variants stop hitching the first time they appear
- a locked chest's cursor carries the LOCKED word like the real client, and the lock verdict never leaks into the sent packet
- enchanting asks before it acts: a bind-on-enchant item gets its confirm popup, and so does replacing an enchant that's already there
- a long gossip menu scrolls like the reference with rows grown to their wrapped text, and music already playing is not restarted when the server re-sends it
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- clicking your mount item while mounted dismounts you, and the mount icon no longer wears a stack "1"
- the horse appears and you're simply in the seat pose with the mount's cloud puff, no spellcast finishing over the saddle — and dismounting cuts clean to standing, no phantom jump-landing
- a mounted rider counter-turns head only, item-targeted spells show the targeting cursor, and the wrong thing in a quiver says "Only Arrows can be placed in that."
- liquid lookups ride a spatial index, and the camera's waterline comes from the client's own corner probe
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- the mount transition re-seats the rider instead of rebuilding them: shield glows, weapon enchants and worn visuals stay lit through mount and dismount
- an enchanted item's tooltip carries its enchant line, coloured per slot, with a temporary enchant's countdown
- a server refusal with nothing to say now says nothing: the raw "Inventory error" debug line is gone, real refusals still print
- the mail icon clears when you close the mailbox, and translucent models classify against the water plane
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- an item use is a real cast with an in-flight gate: the double-click never hides the bar and never ships a duplicate use
- the action bar answers both mouse buttons, and three more click-registration gaps are closed
- a cast right after a camera drag no longer dies to the position you already left
- landing while mounted keeps the gait's cadence, and particle clouds and ribbon trails sort correctly above and below the water surface
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- a buff or debuff keeps its duration timer through a teleport: the table dies with the session now, not with the map change
- a scaled-up creature paces its animation by its size — the Dire Maul ogre's walk drops from 2.2× to true speed, mounts likewise
- the phantom "you have mail" icon at login is gone: no mail means no icon
- underwater there is no sky, and the camera eye never straddles the waterline
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- follow a player and the screen names who you're following, the right-click menu grows its Follow row, and your own movement is what cancels it — creatures are refused like the real client
- a locked lockbox click asks the server instead of refusing silently, a quest-starter chest offers its quest before opening, and an item on cooldown hides its green "open" line
- a parried swing plays its clang like the real client keys it
- the README's What works / Not built yet caught up on a week of shipping
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- /target and /assist find units by name like the original, and /follow walks you behind your target
- right click opens clams and lockboxes, and the tooltip promises it
- the freeze thaws clean, poses release instead of sticking, and you drop to neutral standing before it grips
- unit frame art layers over the bars like the original
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- ice block freezes the body the frame it lands, before the arm even rises
- the loot message links the item, so the name wears its quality colour
- a looted item drops into the bag that actually took it
- effect models live their authored life, born, held, decayed, and bar fills sit under their borders
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- the breath and fatigue bars are in, driven by the server's timers
- combo points show on the target frame, rogue and druid only, per target, and Overpower lights on them
- a stun freezes turning too, and gm fly over water stays in the air
- /sit and the shipped slash commands work, sheathing sounds like the weapon's material, and the bar never holds an outgrown spell rank
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- the granted movement modes are one system now: slow fall slows, levitate hovers, water walking holds the surface, a root pins you even mid-air
- casting while moving refuses with the real error, and a jump cast plays its animation in the air
- Z cycles melee, ranged, stowed, every landed swing draws the weapon, and Alt-Z hides the UI
- login faces where you logged out, and the dev shortcuts moved to Ctrl+Shift off the Windows key
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- spell shimmer timing is right: shared clocks tick together, each cast anchors its own
- the flickering ground items in Orgrimmar are fixed, a transparent draw-order tie
- static scenery answers the mouse again, and the freeze debuff's crackle rings at the target
- bug reports moved to Discord, GitHub issues are closed
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- root and snare state visuals are read from the spell kit's tenth effect slot and planted in the world at the unit's feet, where they belong
- Arcane Intellect's flare is one size cast to cast now: a joint-lane card was taking the sequence twinkle twice (joint and card), sometimes swelling it to 2.5 yards
- refusing a gear piece now names the reason instead of printing a bare count
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- buff durations count down properly: the bar polls the remaining time every frame and a server-sent span reads as real seconds
- ground-targeted spells find the floor: Consecration's and Flamestrike's hovering discs ride the decal projector, and Frost Nova's births ride its expanding ring (the emitter params are per-frame tracks now)
- a spell or action stuck on the cursor lets go on a left click, and a macOS hardware-cursor drift heals itself in-process
- a stealthed weapon fades right: the fade twin's cutout follows the source blend, so an opaque batch never alpha-tests mid-fade
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- the spellbook draws the cooldown pie on a spell that's cooling down, and the active form's slot lights its checked ring
- shader variants warm at startup (with a tripwire if one ever compiles live), so a first cast no longer hitches on shader compile
- additive glow stacks clamp the way the original scene does, taming Frost Nova's blown-out mist, and shoulder cards split only at rigidly separable bones
- the login handshake now reads the same under both SRP encodings, and cooldown events no longer race the net step
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- a stealthed unit's particles and ribbons now dim with the body, and a depth-prime pass stops overlapping translucent parts from darkening each other
- changing gear re-dresses the character in place instead of tearing the whole model down and rebuilding it
- terrain tiles furnish cell-by-cell and model render forms build paced across frames, so first contact with fresh ground no longer hitches
- Ghost Wolf renders properly ghostly, and a live toggle swaps its action-bar icon to the active form while it holds
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- crossing into a new zone lands the whole discovery moment: the "Discovered" toast, the experience line in chat, and the race-keyed jingle
- crossing a tile boundary no longer recycles a whole row of terrain: a keep-band holds what you just left, unloading is budgeted, and fresh requests stagger instead of bursting
- a sheath swap moves the weapon (and its sparkles) to the new slot instead of rebuilding it, and a fading model now dims its own effects with it
- pressing the cast button again cancels the cast, and a form that can't cast a spell refuses it locally instead of round-tripping the server
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- elementals no longer freeze mid-air as corpses: a one-shot death band's clock now clamps instead of wrapping, so the authored dissolve plays out
- an equipped item's sparkles, cards and glows reach the character-select booth and the character sheet's model pane, and a tint reaches a unit's attached items too
- unit lighting is back on the terrain-shade chain, and light ramps chase a clamped target so walking from sun into shade actually ramps
- test accounts gained a full-roster seeding verb (every class levelled, geared and specced in one command)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- 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>
- The login screen stops paying for a world nobody is in. It had been
streaming and simulating all of Elwynn Forest behind a static image — the
client began life as a terrain viewer and the streamers never had an off
switch. The world now boots when you enter it, aimed at the map your
character is actually on, and logging out releases it. Login frame cost:
p50 18.6 to 10.3 cpu ms, worst paced frame 308 to 20 ms; entering
Stratholme is a covered 1.2 s load.
- More login-screen honesty: the fullscreen glue image was re-uploaded to
the GPU every frame — 22 MB a frame for a still picture — and the
braziers' fire had been invisible since the 25th, simulating perfectly
into a camera that is off, because two booths had computed the same render
layer. Both fixed; the flames are back.
- Indoors got truer: the outdoor world draws only through the portal windows
actually in frame, as the original does; the painted-skybox gate settled
on the reference's real rule — any sky-flagged room the portal flood
reaches; and interior objects — gates, hanging signs, chains — take their
room's baked light, anchored at their box centre instead of an artist
pivot that often sits under the floor.
- Hovering with a tooltip up takes its full fix: a tooltip content change
used to run the whole-UI layout solve twice, and it runs once now, on top
of the morning's fix that made an unchanged tooltip cost nothing at all.
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>
- The second half of the open-door fix: the system that applies a door's
state to its collider had never run once. The state arrives with the
spawn, the collider is baked from the model hull frames later, and the
reconcile demanded both in the same frame — so every door kept the solid
collider it was born with. Open gates and forcefields are walkable now,
and the inspector prints solid-or-passable out loud.
- The mouseover follows the original's law: an object you cannot use — in
use, waiting on a quest, or hostile-faction scenery like the enemy's own
doors — shows nothing at all on hover. No tooltip, no highlight, no
cursor. Each object type answers for itself, the way the real client
dispatches it.
- Dun Morogh's snow trees lose their white plates and hard creases: model
textures authored clamp-to-edge were all sampled repeat-wrapped, so a
canopy's deliberate out-of-range margin wrapped back into opaque texels.
The sampler honours the authored address mode now, on this tree, a bad
bush, and hundreds of models like them.
- Odds and ends: the Blasted Lands lightning can actually strike (its
emitters sampled an animation slot that is silent for that model),
donation turn-in quests show their real Continue panel, boss emotes expand
their $name macros, and a rare one-in-256 login failure — a session key
the client hashed differently than the server does — is gone.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Locked doors no longer open on a bare right-click. The client now reads a
lock the way the original does — the free "quick open" every character
carries stops matching keyed doors, so a padlocked door greys the cursor
and refuses unless something you have actually opens it. The same gate
fixes the skinning knife: it only shows for characters who know Skinning.
(Opening a door with its key lands later today.)
- A locked door's tooltip matches the original now: one red "Locked" line,
a single white requirement line, seated in the screen corner instead of
chasing the cursor.
- A door that spawns open sends no state field at all on the wire — the
server omits zero-valued fields and "open" is zero — and the client read
that silence as "unknown" and left the collider solid. Absent now reads as
open. This is the first of two independent defects behind open gates that
still block; the second falls in the next snapshot.
- Indoor creatures and objects fade in already lit by their room, instead of
appearing sun-lit and snapping to interior light the instant the fade ends.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Why fences glowed noon-warm at midnight: our sun lane multiplied the
day/night colour by the client's documented 2.5 for doodads on lit ground,
which pushes past white and clips to a daylit face. Two days of binary
archaeology confirmed that multiply is real — on a render path the
reference machine turns out not to run.
- The settle was an API trace of the actual 1.12.1 client standing at the
same fences: on its Direct3D path the sun arrives at the day/night colour
clamped to at most full strength — one for lit ground, half in baked
shadow, never brighter than the palette. Our lane now commits exactly
that. Midnight is moonlit blue, and adjacent lit/shaded fences blend the
way the original does.
- Along the way: a capture-window override for era-resolution A/Bs, and a
calibration dial that lived exactly one day — the by-eye level it found
matched the traced law to a few parts in 255, then retired.
- Separately, the $-macro text expander now runs everywhere the original
runs it: chat lines, mail bodies and item text, not just the UI strings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Sun-lit fences rendered noon-bright at midnight. The hunt starts here: the
model sun response switches to the curve read out of the real client's own
shipped vertex program, the terrain-shadow bit under any doodad became a
one-command query, and a new golden frame holds a fence lying across the
shadow boundary — both states of the sun term in a single image (with a
night twin). The full resolution lands in the next snapshot.
- Arcane Explosion's ground decal drew as a black tile: the additive blend
was lost when a decal hopped render lanes. A regression, bisected with a
human grading each build, and fixed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- A creature and a chest, photographed in sunlight, in baked shade and
indoors, from both sides — a matrix of golden frames that pins how every
light lane renders a model, so a lighting regression in any one lane shows
up as exactly one failing cell. Building it found two real races.
- Captures pin the animation-LOD gate off now — the third discovered source
of run-to-run drift, where a slow capture run dropped bones from a skeleton
and the golden image quietly disagreed with itself.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- A real defect behind black character-frame portraits: the portrait booth
could catch a model whose material had not finished loading, bake that one
unlucky frame, and then sleep — freezing a black or world-lit pane until
something else forced a re-bake. A booth now refuses to bake until every
part is resident, and retries next frame.
- The zoomed-to-max paperdoll had the same shape: the pane's framing anchors
were fabricated while a display was still loading — a zero pivot height
floored to 0.1, aiming the camera at a 0.1-unit subject — and the bad
framing latched. Anchors now wait for the real model too.
- The reported black portrait itself is reproduced headlessly at last, and
the trigger is gear arriving late, not the map change. Along the way the
booth's own debug camera turned out to be photographing nothing — it shot
before waking the booth, so every dump it ever took was blank. Fixed; the
hunt continues on a working instrument.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Two new golden-capture spots framed by a human eye rather than a lane list:
the Goldshire inn common room (the interior everyone actually stands in) and
a Felwood vista. The sweep also captures the world-map field now.
- An honest-tooling fix: a scenario that failed to produce its image used to
vanish from the diff and the sweep still read green. A missing shot is now
its own loud failure — a clean sweep means every frame was actually compared.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- The UI stopped paying to discover that nothing changed. Layout used to hash
~1,900 frames' worth of inputs every frame just to decide "quiet"; it now
tracks a mutation epoch and answers with one integer compare, and a settled
frame reuses last frame's rendered quads instead of re-rasterizing every
glyph. ~0.9 ms off every idle frame — with a verify mode, forced on across
all 489 UI tests, that re-runs every skipped resolve in full and asserts it
would have produced identical results.
- Across this run of snapshots, the one number everything is graded by: CPU
work per frame at the crowded dungeon spot went from ~29 ms to ~16.5 ms.
- A lighting question got the full treatment and an honest answer. Units
briefly took a different day/night lighting law; it read wrong on screen the
same evening, and a build-by-build hunt a full week back confirmed the
world's look never regressed in the first place — the change is reverted,
nothing about the look changes in this snapshot, and the question stays
parked until the one remaining unknown in the reference client is pinned.
- The character pane's model booth grew a headless eye — a dump of exactly
what it draws, no live session needed — built for that hunt, kept for the
next one.
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>
- Particles, ribbon trails, blob shadows, the selection ring, ground decals,
water foam and the weather all push their quads into one shared vertex
stream now — one buffer, batched draws, indices built per frame in draw
order. ~1,100 emitters at the crowded dungeon spot stopped being ~1,100 mesh
assets the engine reallocated every frame, no material asset is ever mutated
for an effect again, and adjacent draws merge like the original's own batches
(its measured shape: 793 quads in 23 draws). Vertices went camera-relative on
the way — the fix for streaks and flakes vanishing in far zones, where the
raw coordinates get big.
- Hovering an item in your bags cost +14 CPU ms for as long as the tooltip sat
open. The tooltip's refresh loop is faithful 1.12 behaviour (the bag button
re-runs its hover every frame, unthrottled, so a late-arriving item fills in
without a re-hover) — but each rebuild dropped the text measuring cache, so
every frame re-shaped every line. One line keeps the cache: +14 → +0.1 ms,
and the paperdoll, inspect and merchant tooltips stop paying the same tax as
spikes.
- "Which room is this creature in" walks one anchor per model instead of every
lit part — ~13,700 part visits a frame became ~1,700 anchor rows. The
frame-time win was honestly flat (the cost had already moved elsewhere); it
lands for the structure, and the old sweep's repair duties became
event-driven with it.
- The perf probe defends its own window now — always-on-top from the first
tick, occlusion counted on the measurement line — after two long overnight
runs were silently destroyed by the display going to sleep.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- A tester handed us a clean repro: note your framerate, tour a few dungeons,
come back — the client never recovers until restart. The cause: every dedup
cache held its assets for the life of the process, and two material tickers
touch every cached material every frame — so every map you visited made every
later frame more expensive, everywhere. Caches are map-scoped now: one hop
out of a dungeon measurably kills its whole payload (2,069 materials, ~300
models), and the perf probe grew a residency meter so this class of leak is
machine-checked from here on.
- Printed honestly: a second, far smaller retention (~25 models of toured
display payload) survives the teardown, holder still unknown — the hunt
continues, and the reporter's retest is the decisive check on the big one.
- The sky stopped re-uploading its materials every frame at rest — sun, both
moons, the star dome, the sky dome: ~17 uploads a frame with nothing moving
on screen, now zero until a displayed byte actually changes.
- The liquid animator sleeps on maps with no water, and the physics solver runs
one substep instead of six — the world has no dynamic bodies to solve for.
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 voidwalker's eye glow vanished whenever the camera rose above eye level.
Three investigations said depth; measuring the depth buffer inside the live
quads said otherwise — the fragments reached the framebuffer every frame, and
the body's own transparent batches painted over them. The real client draws a
model's particles after that model's batches, always. Ours now does: every
effect carries a draw-order rung sized to clear exactly its own model.
- Widened to every effect family after asking "what else does this fix": ribbon
trails (a wisp's streamers wove six batches deep into its own body and
flickered as the head whipped) and 3-D model particles (Cone of Cold's
shards). A census over all 9,691 models found 967 whose own body could paint
over their effects; all take the rung now.
- The skinning lane is ours end to end: every rig's joint matrices live in our
shared GPU buffer, written only when a rig actually moved, and our shader
reads them. The engine's lane rewrote the entire joint buffer every frame and
swept every entity in the world for changed transforms — that machinery now
runs against empty sets. Another 6.7 CPU ms off the worst reported dungeon
spot, which now holds a flat 60 fps with p99 under 19 ms.
- Getting around while developing: Ctrl+Cmd+G lands your character where the
free-fly camera is, and Alt-clicking the world map teleports you there (both
ride the server's own teleport, GM-gated). The frozen-body coordinates the
panel used to copy while flying now follow the camera.
- A stuck main thread now diagnoses itself: a watchdog samples our own stacks
and prints where the time went, and a hung teardown names its last system
instead of hanging the window.
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>
- A creature that was already walking when it came into view stood frozen at
its spawn point, then teleported — up to a full wander leg, 30 yards in the
worst measured case — when its next movement packet arrived. The create
packet carries the live path (where the unit is along it, how much is left)
and we parsed all of it into the void. The unit now joins its walk exactly
where the server has it: measured before/after, 13% of movement starts were
over-a-yard teleports, now effectively zero.
- Walking into Zul'Gurub or Stratholme through the portal dropped you straight
through the world. The landing check asks "is there a floor under me?" — but
on the arrival frame the loaded world is still the map you just left, and an
instance entrance is a copy of its outdoor ground at the same coordinates,
0.23 yards under your feet. The old floor said yes, then despawned. The hold
now waits for the destination's own ground to arrive, and a world that never
arrives keeps the loading screen instead of dropping you into the void.
- Same fix covers a decoder hazard found on the way: a plain two-point path
announces two points but ships only the destination, and trusting the count
over-ran the packet — it never fires on our server's pathfinder, but now it
can't.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- One text-input law for every field. Login, character create and the delete
dialog each improvised their own tiny keyboard handling — no caret movement,
no selection, no clipboard, and Ctrl/Cmd+V typed a literal "v" into the
password box. All of them now run the same byte-verified edit-box law as
chat: clipboard, select-all, word moves, shift-selection, the real 0.5 s
caret blink. The password box masks what you copy off it, like the original.
- Copy/paste on Linux had two independent causes, one per direction: our window
is Wayland but the clipboard backend spoke X11 only, and a copy relinquished
the X11 selection the moment it returned (an X11 clipboard lives only as long
as its owning connection). Both fixed — Wayland windows get a real Wayland
clipboard, X11 keeps a held handle. AltGr is not Ctrl anymore either, so
Polish and German layouts can type ą, ć and ź in chat instead of triggering
select-all. Compile-checked on Linux; wants a real-session retest.
- The exterior sun keeps its colour. A per-channel clamp saturated the warm
continental sun to pale yellow-white on every sunlit fence, post and doodad;
the clamp now happens once, at the sum, so the fiery orange survives — the
reported Silverpine fence and Blackrock steps match the reference's own
arithmetic.
- A pool has a floor. Undercity's upper slime channels claimed the dry room a
storey below them — 115 yards down still read as submerged. A pool now stops
at its own room's floor; a sweep of every building in the shipped world found
51 such stacked sites across 6 buildings, all closed.
- Ctrl/Cmd+Z hides the whole UI layer for clean screenshots, and instrumented
debug runs open their window in the background instead of stealing focus.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- A pool belongs to a room now. Uldaman read as deep underwater because a
mushroom cave's pool 186 yards up claimed every position beneath it forever;
Undercity's NPCs swam on dry stone because Tirisfal's lake — 95 yards of rock
overhead — still answered for them, and the camera took the whole screen
underwater with it. Every liquid query (player, camera eye, every unit) is now
scoped to the building that owns the water, verified against the real 1.12.1
files at both reported spots.
- Druid forms work. A live display change — shapeshift, GM morph, revive — was
only ever read at spawn; now the model swaps instantly and a size change eases
over the real client's two seconds. A bear-form druid shows no weapon, exactly
like the original: only a character body attaches held items.
- 126 NPCs across the world were bald and earless. An amulet's display row sits
in their head slot, and its "tuck the hair under the helm" mask fired with no
helm to tuck under. A mask now needs an actual helm model; the gnome suppliers
get their pigtails, ears and earrings back.
- The pouring lava in Blackrock Mountain and the Great Forge came back. A prop
that spans several rooms (a lava fall is named by up to 19) was culled with
only the first room that names it, so it blinked in and out by camera angle.
A prop now draws while any of its rooms is visible.
- The Undercity entrance lightshafts dim to their authored 10% instead of
flooding the throne room with blinding white columns.
- An indoor pool fogs with its room now, instead of hazing with the outdoor
scene while the wall beside it hazed with the room. Magma and slime take fog
too — "fullbright" in the data meant unlit, never unfogged.
- Backing the camera out through the Deadmines entrance swirl no longer blanks
the whole dungeon: the sealed pocket behind the portal has a detail-only
floor the room-finder couldn't stand on, so it declared you outside. A third
fallback leg now names the room from the camera-collision faces.
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>
