benilla
A complete World of Warcraft 1.12.1 client, written from scratch in Rust and Bevy
benilla plays the whole game: character creation, questing and professions, dungeons and raids,
battlegrounds and honor, groups, guilds, trade, mail and the auction house, on the stock 1.12
interface and with your addons. It connects to a 1.12.1 server over the original protocol and
reads the game's data from your own 1.12.1 install. Every file format, the network protocol and
the interface engine are written from scratch, with no original client code, no third-party WoW
crates and no bundled game assets.
## What's inside
- **Formats:** readers for the whole asset stack (the MPQ patch chain, BLP, DBC, ADT, WDT, WDL, M2
and WMO), wired into Bevy as an asset source.
- **World:** terrain streamed out to the horizon, portal-culled buildings with interior lighting,
doodads and ground clutter, swimmable water, sky and weather, and the client's own day/night
lighting, fog and gamma.
- **Models:** GPU-skinned M2s with the full animation controller, particles, ribbons and the spell
visuals, and characters end to end: customization, the armor composite, weapons with their
enchant glows, forms, stealth and mounts.
- **Movement:** networked movement in both directions, the server-granted modes from slow fall to
roots, a follow camera with collision, boats, zeppelins and taxi flights.
- **Networking:** SRP6 auth through world-session crypto and the object mirror into the ECS,
covering the game from movement and chat through combat, spells, groups and raids, quests,
trade, mail, the auction house and battlegrounds.
- **Interface:** a FrameXML and Lua engine that runs the stock 1.12 interface off your install's
patch chain, and third-party 1.12 addons: Questie, pfUI, Bagnon, Bartender2 and most others
run. By choice, the options window and the ESC menu follow the Classic Era client's rather than
1.12's.
- **Audio:** music, ambience and effects under the client's own selection and crossfade rules,
with interior and underwater transitions and zone reverb.
The format readers and the UI engine core are plain Rust with no Bevy in them, and the world
renderer runs with no game attached. [`docs/MAP.md`](docs/MAP.md) maps every crate and subsystem,
generated from the code.
## Status
Complete and fully playable. What is left:
- The long tail of small features that separates a working client from a finished one, tracked
as [issues](https://github.com/samwhosung/benilla/issues).
- Addons, options and performance, ongoing.
benilla is a faithful 1.12.1 client and the foundation people build on. There are no prebuilt
downloads: a packaged build, a particular server's changes or anything 1.12.1 never had belongs
in a fork, and forks are welcome. GitHub lists
[every public fork](https://github.com/samwhosung/benilla/forks).
Not planned: other expansions or client versions, Warden (anticheat).
## Running it
benilla builds and runs on macOS, Linux and Windows. You need:
- **An English 1.12.1 client (build 5875)** for the game data. benilla only reads it.
- **A 1.12.1 server with Warden off.** [vmangos](https://github.com/vmangos/core) is what
development runs against, and it ships with Warden off; cMaNGOS and the other 1.12.1 cores speak
the same protocol.
- **Stable Rust and a C compiler**, because the client's Lua is built from source: on macOS the
Xcode command line tools, on Linux the ALSA and udev development packages and pkg-config, on
Windows the MSVC build tools that the Rust installer sets up.
```sh
WOW_DATA=/path/to/WoW/Data cargo run --release -p benilla
```
On Windows, in PowerShell:
```powershell
$env:WOW_DATA="C:\path\to\WoW\Data"; cargo run --release -p benilla
```
Each release is a tag on the [Releases page](https://github.com/samwhosung/benilla/releases):
`git checkout