gromandClaude Opus 5
280c2e886f
The starburst was three defects, and none of them was the oblique projection I blamed it on in the last commit. What found them was looking at the mirror's own render target instead of reasoning about the composited frame — the water reads it through a fresnel weight, a rippled UV, a plane-match band and an SSR march that paints over it, so from the outside a broken mirror and a broken water shader look identical. WOW_MIRROR_DUMP=1 now writes that target beside the capture. (Bevy's own save_to_disk cannot: try_into_dynamic knows four 8-bit formats and answers UnsupportedFormat for Rgba16Float, logging and writing nothing.) - The oblique row's scale. Replacing the near plane with the water plane costs the FAR plane: `z >= 0` stops meaning "nearer than CAM_FAR" and becomes `depth >= a*d`, a plane through the eye tilted by a. Lengyel's own scale puts that plane exactly through the frustum's far corner, and the sky dome is pinned just inside the far plane, so it straddled the boundary and was sliced along its own tessellation. Scale by the supremum of d/depth over the frustum instead, with 2% of margin. - The water surface lay ON its own clip plane. This was the starburst and it was fatal rather than untidy: depth now means "distance above the plane", so a fragment at d=0 reads z/w=1, the nearest value reverse-Z has, and beats every other surface in the frame. The mesh is wave-displaced, so its triangles straddled the plane instead of lying in it, and each was clipped to a sliver that kept the winning depth. SURFACE_CLEARANCE lifts the plane a yard: the swell sums to 0.34 and the probed height answers for the surface under the eye, not this fragment. - The mirror was stored upside down. A true reflection is what a camera on the far side sees with its up vector reflected too — an improper basis no Transform can hold. The honest right-handed camera sees the same surfaces through the same frustum and stores the image flipped, so the shader samples 1 - v; that costs no winding flip, so backface culling stays correct. It read as a lake reflecting the ridge the RIGHT way up. Measured: Lake Everstill 2.87 -> 3.36 ms mean over 600 frames (+17%), the Stormwind canal inside the noise, CPU +0.2 to +1.1 ms. It is the first lane in docs/GRAPHICS.md that spends main thread, so it is a rung of its own above High and the default stays 2. Seated as a setting, per the standing rule that no graphics lane hides behind an env var: waterQuality gains tier 3, the Ultra preset takes it, and the Advanced Graphics dropdown gains a fourth entry in both locales. With the lane off, both scenarios are byte-identical to the build before it — which took two findings of its own: - The system could not live in Update at all. `&mut Transform` on a camera is shared with everything that moves anything; declaring it put 59 undeclared orders into Update and tripped the schedule ratchet, which is what kept this behind an env var. It belongs in PostUpdate with the skybox and the billboards, after propagation and before visibility, where it also reads the eye's settled pose instead of a frame-old one. (The comment blaming ResMut<Assets<Image>> for those 59 was wrong — dropping the asset handle changed the count by zero.) - A system that runs and returns on its first line is still not free. Holding &mut Camera and &mut GlobalTransform for a frame is enough to change which undeclared orders the executor picks: the canal moved 0.75% of its pixels by up to 96/255 with the lane switched off. So the whole system sits behind a run condition rather than an early return — and the same effect killed a .before(UpdateDirectionalLightCascades) order that was correct in itself. PostUpdate's ambiguity ceiling goes 466 -> 495 with the reason (the pairs are structurally impossible: nothing else in the schedule names the mirror camera); Update's ratchets down 4973 -> 4952. Also restores scripts/gates.sh's `where` example, which had gone missing. Its absence was silent — cargo's error went to /dev/null and `|| true` made it read as "no install" — so the memo key and the player-tests gate saw none even when WOW_DATA was set. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01SgstFWtn1RxEJ5kVrpgYwn
benilla — Everwood graphics
A graphics fork of benilla, the from-scratch World of Warcraft 1.12.1 client in Rust and Bevy by samwhosung. This repository adds an optional modern look on top of it. Every feature has its own switch under Options → Advanced Graphics, and the Classic preset keeps the original 1.12 image.
The goal of this particular fork is baking in certain dlls like Superwow and nampower into Rust to allow the use of common addons on Octowow.
This repository is maintained and will stay open source. Contributions are welcome: open an issue or a pull request.
Graphics features
Lighting and shadows
- Realtime sun shadows for characters and the world, including foliage; moon shadows at night
- Moonlight: at night the moon lights the world (cool, dim, from the moon's place in the sky) on top of the original night colours
- Dynamic building interiors lit by their own fixtures
- Torches, braziers and lamps emit flickering light and cast cube-map shadows; terrain blocks torch light
- Daylight through doors and windows (including Stormwind's rooms and cathedral windows)
- Spell and ground-effect lights, lava glow
- Screen-space ambient occlusion (soft contact shadows)
Sky
- Smooth sky gradient with dithering, soft sun glow
- Procedural star field with a Milky Way
- Sun-lit, detailed clouds
- Zone skyboxes (Burning Steppes, Blasted Lands, Mount Hyjal) and the 1.12
LightSkyboxclear-weather slot
Fog and atmosphere
- Modern fog model: the world fades into the horizon, sun-coloured toward the sun
- Volumetric fog (distance haze)
- Volumetric light: sun and moon shafts marched through the shadow map (god rays through canopies and between buildings, faint moon shafts at night)
- Lamps glowing through fog at night
- Screen-space sun shafts
- Render distance up to 1497 yards
Post-processing
- HDR bloom for fire, lava, spells and lit windows
- Per-zone colour grading (day/night LUTs)
Water
- Enhanced water: refraction, caustics, depth colour, screen-space reflections
- Enhanced city and building water (Stormwind canals)
- Gerstner waves with whitecaps, finer mesh up close
Weather and nature
- Rain: wet ground, puddles, glossy stone, rings on water, shelter under roofs and bridges
- Wind: grass and tree sway with gusts, grass parts around characters
Settings
- One Graphics Preset: Classic / Low / Medium / High / Ultra / Custom (default High)
- Every feature individually switchable on the Advanced Graphics page
Details: LIGHTING.md, WATER.md. Third-party credits, including code ported
from WarcraftXL by iThorgrim: THIRD-PARTY.md.
Licence: same as upstream benilla, MIT OR Apache-2.0.
The upstream benilla README follows.
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 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.
- 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.
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 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.
WOW_DATA=/path/to/WoW/Data cargo run --release -p benilla
On Windows, in PowerShell:
$env:WOW_DATA="C:\path\to\WoW\Data"; cargo run --release -p benilla
Each release is a tag on the Releases page:
git checkout <tag> first runs that release, and main is the development tip.
WOW_DATA names the install's Data folder; a link to the install named WoW at the repo root
does the same (ln -s /path/to/WoW WoW, or on Windows a junction, which needs no admin rights:
New-Item -ItemType Junction -Path WoW -Target C:\path\to\WoW). The server defaults to
localhost:3724, the stock auth port. Point WOW_HOST at another (WOW_HOST=play.example.com, or
play.example.com:5000 for a remapped port), or set it from the Realmlist button on the login
screen, which remembers it. Credentials go in at the login screen, or set WOW_USER and WOW_PASS
to skip it.
Settings, screenshots and addons live in benilla-config/ at the repo root: a 1.12 addon goes in
benilla-config/AddOns/. docs/CONTRIBUTING.md has the rest, from the
player build to the tests.
Optional, locally built skybox and colour-grading data: Optional/sky-and-grading/.
Contributing
Issues and pull requests are open. docs/CONTRIBUTING.md says where to
start, what gets in, how a change is judged and what happens to a pull request once it is open.
Bugs, questions and ideas are welcome on the Discord too.
Early inspiration and file format guidance came from the wowemulation-dev community, and warcraft-rs in particular.
benilla is an independent fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Blizzard Entertainment.
It ships no Blizzard content: no art, models, sounds, maps, MPQ contents or FrameXML. You
provide your own legally obtained 1.12.1 client, and the stock interface runs off its FrameXML at
runtime. The few files under crates/benilla-app/assets/ui/ are our own, not copies of it:
adapters over stock files, and the settings windows and script error log benilla draws itself.
World of Warcraft is a trademark of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. Our own code is licensed under
MIT or Apache 2.0, at your option. The three vendored components
under third_party/, the kira audio engine, a Lua 5.1 patched to the 1.12 client's dialect and the
mlua FFI layer with its traceback's global-table search removed, keep their own upstream licenses,
alongside each. Code and techniques ported from other projects
(WarcraftXL, by iThorgrim) are credited file by file in THIRD-PARTY.md.