gromandClaude Opus 5
33fc0c2023
`volumetricFog` gains tier 3, "Volume", with a "Shadowed Air" dial beside it; the Ultra rung of Lighting Quality takes it. A view-space 160x90x64 froxel grid — a fixed BUDGET, so every resolution costs the same — marched one compute thread per screen COLUMN, front to back, with a reprojected eight-frame history. Inject and integrate in one pass, because a froxel past the last shadow cascade has no evidence either way and the honest answer is the mean of what the rest of its column could see; a thread that owns the column can carry that and a froxel-per-invocation dispatch cannot. It publishes two things: - **the lit share** — how much of the air in front of each pixel the sun actually reaches, weighted by each slice's own contribution to what the eye sees through it. `volumetric_fog`'s haze multiplies its colour by it. The haze below this rung is the reference's: a zone colour mixed in by distance, the SAME colour whether the air it tints stands in open sun or a mountain's shadow, and no screen pass can tell it otherwise because a shaft march only ever ADDS light. On an Elwynn overlook at noon, 74% of the frame is air the sun does not fully reach. - **the lamps' in-scatter**, free once a volume exists: the phase lobe evaluated at every point of the air rather than once per ray at its closest approach, attenuated by the medium it crosses and strengthened when the medium is. `lampFog`'s analytic halos retire into this solve at tier 3, and that row still chooses which lamps and how many. The gain is derived, `0.9 / density(clear night)`, so the two lanes match on a clear night. At the Goldshire inn, isolating each by rendering lampFog 0 against 2 on both (the bases are byte-identical, which is what makes it a comparison): the volume's are 1.30x and wider. The sun's SHAFTS deliberately stay on `volumetric_light`'s per-pixel march, and that is a measurement. A volume bands in hard horizontal steps at 160x90, 320x180 and 534x300 alike, because one froxel column hands the same value to about a hundred pixels and a canopy's shadow is finer than any grid worth paying for. Spreading each column's samples across its own screen footprint (R2 down the column) turns the steps into a gradient and is worth knowing for any volume, but the march still wins on detail. docs/GRAPHICS.md has the sweep. Safety is one number: fully lit air multiplies by EXACTLY 1, so at Shadowed Air 0 the lane renders byte-identical to High over all 1,440,000 pixels with every pass still running. Getting that exact needed `1 - (1-floor)*(1-lit)` and not the `mix(floor, 1, lit)` it equals — `mix` is a fused multiply-add and lands a last ulp below 1.0, which moved five of nine tier 0-2 control pairs with the rung switched OFF. The shipped floor, 0.85, is deliberately half the depth of the first one tried, and the dial reaches twice it. Control: nine tier 0-2 pairs against the previous build, five byte-identical and four differing by one or two PIXELS out of 1,440,000 at 1-2 of 255 — every tier-0 pair identical, and tier 0 is the tier that switches the fog pass off, so the remainder is the fog shader's instruction schedule changing because the shader did. Cost is under the noise of both instruments: the frame probe puts Volume inside High's own run-to-run spread, and the GPU pass timer puts `gpu_other` at 0.75 -> 0.76 ms. Also recorded: `water-lake` leaves the deterministic row once shadows are forced on — it differs from a build of ITSELF by up to 88/255 on 0.03% of pixels. 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.