- The main menu bar's two empty recesses fill. The micro menu — the eight arched
buttons: character, spellbook, talents, quest log, socials, world map, main menu,
help — sits in the dark panel between the page arrows and the bags, transcribed
from the reference's own layout: the character button wears your portrait, a button
holds itself down while its panel is up, and the talent button appears at level 10.
The latency meter fills the one slot the bar art leaves transparent for exactly it,
tinted green/yellow/red on the reference's 300/600 ms thresholds and drawn UNDER
the bar art, seen through its window, the way 1.12 actually does it. The socials
and main-menu buttons find their panels one snapshot later; help still waits.
- The UI explains itself on hover: 1.12 ships its detailed two-line tooltips ON — a
FrameXML default, not the opt-in extra it is often remembered as — so the micro
buttons, your own portrait, the XP bar, the five bag buttons and the ping meter
all answer a hover with the reference's own explanations.
- The PvP flag, end to end: crossed swords on the player, target and party frames,
driven by the two descriptor bits the wire actually carries, and `/pvp` speaks —
the yellow toast plus the system chat line, the OFF sentence being the one that
warns the flag lingers for five minutes. It really does linger: turning it off
waits out the server's timer, which looks like a bug and is the reference.
- Quest markers stopped freezing. The grey `!` over a questgiver above your level
goes gold the moment you ding, an NPC re-entering view is asked afresh instead of
wearing a session-old answer, and the marker drops when the questgiver bit goes
off — the re-ask triggers mirror the reference's own set, plus one named addition
(your own level changing).
- Water and heights: swimming downhill no longer bounces between swim and fall ten
times a second — the surface line is a two-sided constraint, so the swimmer
settles with the river instead of being left behind by it. And collision height
is per-unit now, read from the unit's own model: a gnome used to swim with a
third of a yard of water over her head because five depth lines were quoting a
human's number.
- A round of pixel honesty in text and chat: the newest chat line no longer wears a
wider drop shadow than every line above it (shadows move in whole pixels now),
keeps its descenders, and hover boxes stop painting over the chat body. The chat
input's history browse survives programmatic edits, a failed script chunk warns
instead of vanishing, and recall deepens to 64 lines. Idle animation got honest
too: a model's idle is Stand resolved through its own lookup table — never
file order, which had the duel flag bobbing on its spawn clip — and an armed idle
is culled on the box its animation authors, not the bind pose, so the flag stops
vanishing at most camera angles.
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>
