- 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>
- The social window: friends, ignore and `/who`, in the reference's own two-level
arrangement with its inner tabs and per-row right-click menus. The lists ride the
real wire — guid-keyed with no names, resolved through the name cache, and capped
at 50 friends / 25 ignores because those are the client's own caps — and the
ignore list does its actual job: an ignored speaker's chat is dropped silently, a
whisper additionally tells the sender, and a duel challenge is auto-declined.
Guild ships as a disabled tab, which is what a guildless character sees.
- The escape menu: ESC's last rung finally opens something. The game menu lands at
the reference's own size and ladder, and leaving works — logout and quit with the
server owning the clock (instant at an inn, refused in combat, or the 20-second
countdown), narrated by the real camp/quit dialogs. While the menu holds the
center nothing else opens, and the bag bar greys out under it.
- Items on the action bar act like items. An equipped trinket was a dead button;
the reference's use law is two stages — not equippable means use, equippable and
already worn means use in place — over its exact search order (equipment first,
then the bags, then the backpack, then the keyring; never the bank). What can go
on the bar is now the reference's own two filters, byte-read: an item with an
on-use spell or one you can equip, and no passive spells — and dropping a passive
there speaks the real client's own line, "You can't put a passive ability in the
action bar."
- A quest-starter item opens its quest instead of "The item was not found." The
question goes to the item's own guid, never through item-use — which the server
refuses for every one of the 215 quest-starter items — and refusing the quest
says what the client says, then closes the window.
- For the toolbox: a pixel pick that reports everything under the cursor all the
way back, a lens that says which render phase a draw landed in, and switches that
separate "discarded" from "lost depth" from "never drawn" — built while cornering
a flickering tent, whose fix ships in the next snapshot.
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>
- Other players walk the world. A watched player's motion between server updates now runs through
the same grounded movement resolve as your own character — same capsule, same colliders, same
step-up and ground election — so they follow terrain every frame instead of every packet, and
stop at a wall instead of walking into it and being snapped back. Their jumps are swept against
the world too, and a standstill jump steered mid-air reports that steer, the one mid-air press
the reference client broadcasts rather than defers.
- The move relay rebuilt: relayed moves ride a per-unit chain on real time, a due move never jumps
ahead of its unit's queue, and SMSG_COMPRESSED_MOVES — the batched carrier the server sends under
load — is decoded rather than skipped. Our own send path now matches the reference client's:
facing streams while moving, Nagle is off so each packet is one write, and the strafe axis nets so
left and right can never ride the same packet.
- NPC and quest text speaks the whole $-macro grammar, carved from the reference bytes — your name,
class and race, the gendered forms, and the server's live world states — and the same
substitution feeds gossip, quest text, the quest log and unit frames. Greetings are a weighted
draw, rolled per NPC per open, and a quest giver with no quest to give is no longer clickable,
where it used to open a dialog holding nothing but a placeholder greeting.
- Spell tooltips finish the reference's line law: cast time and cooldown behind the real passive
gate, the required tool or form, the reagents block, the chance-to-X line, a multi-bit
equipped-item requirement named properly instead of by raw bits, and a buff's dispel class.
- The UI layout engine got a dense, reusable anchor solver, and a change gate that skips the resolve
entirely on frames where no layout input moved — in practice, almost every idle frame. Pets are
named by their pet number rather than a creature-template entry, so the client asks the query the
server can actually answer. And the asset extractor grew a stray-geometry census for tracking
down geometry that renders where it should not.
This snapshot replaces the six dated `sync` commits that stood here before it, whose subjects said
nothing but the date. If you cloned before now: `git fetch && git reset --hard origin/main`.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
