SamandClaude Fable 5
2c55790ec1
- 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>
benilla
A from-scratch World of Warcraft 1.12.1 client in Rust + Bevy, speaking the vanilla protocol to a vmangos server. Every file format and the network protocol are implemented from scratch — no original client code, no third-party WoW crates, and no bundled game assets: benilla reads its data at runtime from your own 1.12.1 install.
What works
- Formats & assets — in-repo readers for the full asset stack (MPQ patch chain, BLP, DBC, ADT/WDT/WDL, M2, WMO), wired into Bevy as an asset source, plus extraction CLI tools.
- World — streamed terrain with the distant horizon, portal-culled WMOs with interior lighting, doodads and ground clutter, swimmable liquids, sky and weather, and the client's own day/night lighting, fog, glow, and gamma passes.
- Models & animation — GPU-skinned M2s with the full animation controller (cross-fades, one-shots, fidgets), a near feature-complete particle system, ribbons, and animated gameobjects (doors, chests, mailboxes, lifts).
- Characters — customization end to end, the armor-region texture composite, held weapons and sheathing, and mounts.
- Movement & travel — a WoW-feel controller (run/strafe/jump/swim/step-up), networked movement in both directions, a follow-camera with collision, ridden boats and zeppelins, and taxi flights.
- Networking — SRP6 auth through world-session crypto, the object-descriptor mirror into the ECS, and live wire coverage for movement, chat, spells and auras, party, mail, trade, vendors, bank, trainers, quests, loot with group rolls, and death.
- UI — a from-scratch FrameXML + Lua UI engine driving the built-in interface: login and character screens, the full HUD, the classic windows (bags, spellbook, talents, quests, mail, merchant, trade, bank, world map, …), chat, and tooltips.
- Combat — melee with the faithful swing law, ranged and Auto Shot, casting with GCD, cooldowns and the cancel ladder, and the spell-visual pipeline (kits, missiles, impacts, ground rings).
- Audio — music, ambience, and SFX under the client's own selection and crossfade rules, with interior/underwater transitions and zone reverb.
Not built yet
Guilds, the auction house, hunter/warlock pets, duels and inspect, the social panel (friends/who), PvP systems, the macros/options/key-binding screens, and third-party addon loading — the Lua/FrameXML engine currently runs only the built-in UI.
Running it
You need a 1.12.1 (build 5875) client install for game data, a vmangos server to connect to, and stable Rust.
WOW_DATA=/path/to/WoW/Data cargo run --release -p benilla
The server defaults to localhost — point WOW_HOST at any IP or hostname, with an optional
auth port: WOW_HOST=play.example.com:3724. A bare host uses port 13724 (this project's own dev
deploy); a stock vmangos realmd listens on 3724, so you'll usually want the explicit port.
Credentials go in at the login screen, or set WOW_USER / WOW_PASS to skip it.
Contributing
benilla is a solo project and isn't taking pull requests for now. Bug reports and questions are welcome — open an issue, or bring them to Discord. Comments throughout the code cite numbered decision records and method notes from a private development log; the citations won't resolve here, but the reasoning they carry is kept in the comments themselves.
Development happens in that private tree, and this repo is its published export: each commit here is one squashed snapshot of everything that landed since the last one, titled with what changed — not an atomic change, which is why they're large and why there are few of them.
Acknowledgements
The wowemulation-dev community — and warcraft-rs in particular — was an early inspiration and a source of guidance on the client's file formats. benilla's readers ended up written from scratch, but their preservation work made starting far less daunting. And none of this runs without vmangos on the other end of the socket.
Legal
benilla is an independent, fan-made project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Blizzard Entertainment. It contains no Blizzard code or assets and never will; you must provide your own legally-obtained 1.12.1 client for game data. World of Warcraft is a trademark of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.
License
Licensed under either of the Apache License 2.0 or the MIT license, at your option.