gromandClaude Opus 5
355bac7b0e
A second camera on the far side of the water plane, rendering into a half-viewport target that `enhanced_water.wgsl` reads BENEATH the screen-space march — so SSR still wins wherever it finds something, and the mirror only fills the hole SSR cannot reach: the ray leaving the screen, and the top-edge fade, which is exactly where a shallow-angle lake wants its far bank. **It does not work yet, and it is not offered to anyone.** The mirrored eye sits as far below the surface as the real eye sits above it — 26 yd down on Lake Everstill — which is inside the lake bed, so the pass must clip at the water plane or it renders sand. The clip is implemented (Lengyel, adapted to this client's reverse-Z, around a finite far plane because the oblique row makes depth affine and an infinite far collapses every distant fragment onto one value) and it is WRONG: the mirror comes back a radial smear. So this is `WOW_WATER_MIRROR=1`, a dev lever — no CVar, no row in Options. It graduates to both, like every other lane, once a capture shows a reflection instead of a starburst. What IS established, and is why this lands rather than waiting: - **With the lane off the water is byte-identical** to before the pass existed, verified against a `git stash`ed build of the same tree. - With it on it reaches the water and moves 63% of a lake frame — the plumbing, the binding, the uniform and the composite all carry. - Off, the plugin **registers nothing at all**, the posture `static_gx::enabled` takes. That is not tidiness: `drive_mirror` declares `ResMut<Assets<Image>>`, and merely registering it dormant added 59 undeclared orders to `Update` and tripped the schedule ratchet. Three things this cost, all of them now written into `docs/GRAPHICS.md` and all of them my own: 1. **The pipeline failed to compile for most of a session while every A/B read a clean zero.** The field is `clip_position`; `WaterFragment` has no `position`. Naga refused the shader, the water fell back to another path, and I measured the fallback over and over — including twice mistaking the lake bed seen through clear water for a working mirror. The client logs pipeline errors rather than panicking, by design, so the answer was in the log the whole time. **Grep the capture log for `error:` before believing any shader A/B.** 2. **A disabled lane is not automatically free.** Starting SSR's march from the fogged `reflection` instead of `sky` looked equivalent and moved 10.1% of a lake frame with the mirror switched off. The control that catches that is diffing lane-off against a stashed build — not against an older capture, which is what I reached for first. 3. **A flag colour has to be one the scene cannot produce.** My first three "every gate passes" measurements were counting the orange lake bed as my red flag, which sent the hunt in the wrong direction for an hour. The pass's own cost is deliberately unmeasured: it draws the scene a second time, so it is the first item on the programme that spends main thread, and pricing a broken render against item 1's view-distance table would mean nothing. That happens when the projection does. Verified: ALL GATES GREEN (591 s); `benilla-app --lib` against the install at the exact 269-failure baseline, set-identical by `comm`. 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.