- `renderScale`: the world renders into its off-screen target at a fraction — or a multiple — of the window while text, icons and frame art stay native; the logical viewport comes out arithmetically unchanged, so picking cannot see the scale at all, and every hand-written sampler takes the `log2(scale)` mip bias below 100 % and none above it, where the sharper mip is what makes supersampling work — measured here at 26x the world pixels for +0.02 ms, and reachable as a Render Scale row on the Graphics page (50–200 %), staged to Apply so a dragged slider rebuilds the world target once instead of thirty times a sweep - a party member who walks out of range keeps their numbers and their face (B334): the client asks — `CMSG_REQUEST_PARTY_MEMBER_STATS` goes out on the despawn edge and for a roster member gained unseen, the same two edges the reference sends from — the record is snapshotted whole from the live descriptor at the moment the object deactivates, a never-seen member seats at the reference's 1/1 placeholder rather than an empty bar, and the raw-to-display divide happens at the read, so an out-of-range warrior stops reading ten times the rage; the portrait binds a guid-keyed bake cache built as a handover — the booth's own target image moves into the cache as its member streams out, so the face freezes with no copy and no flicker — and the self-review adds that a changed occupant is a re-bake and the record's dead/ghost bits are read - a slider row's number sits on its label's line (B232): the readout hung off the control frame and inherited a +3 art nudge that exists to seat the groove texture — four pixels off on an eleven-pixel cap height at the reporter's geometry — so the nudge moves onto the two frames that draw the art, across eight rows on three pages, and the bar itself does not move a pixel; `$WOW_DPI` renders on a player's pixel grid, so a 1x reporter's screenshot and a capture from this 2x machine compare pixel-for-pixel Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Important
Issues and pull requests are closed here. benilla is a solo project developed in a private tree; this repo is its export, published as squashed snapshots, so a PR here has nothing to land on. The best way to contribute is to join the Discord and report the bugs you find. Questions and ideas are welcome in the same place.
benilla speaks the original 1.12.1 protocol, so it connects to any server the real client could, and reads its game data at runtime from your own 1.12.1 install. Every file format and the network protocol are implemented from scratch, with no original client code, no third-party WoW crates, and no bundled game assets.
What works
- Formats: readers for the full asset stack (MPQ patch chain, BLP, DBC, ADT/WDT/WDL, M2, WMO), wired into Bevy as an asset source.
- World: streamed terrain out to the 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 and gamma passes.
- Models: GPU-skinned M2s with the full animation controller, a near feature-complete particle system, ribbons, and animated gameobjects from doors to lifts.
- Characters: customization end to end, the armor texture composite, weapons with sheathing and enchant glows, shapeshift forms, stealth and mounts.
- Movement: a WoW-feel controller, 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, the object mirror into the ECS, and live wire coverage from movement and chat through spells, party, quests, mail, trade, vendors, bank, loot, the auction house and PvP honor.
- UI: a from-scratch FrameXML + Lua engine driving the built-in interface, from the login and
character screens through the full HUD, the classic windows (guild, macros and key bindings
included), chat, nameplates, floating combat text and tooltips; third-party addons load from
a
benilla-config/AddOns/folder beside the executable (partial — see below). - Combat: melee on the faithful swing law, ranged and Auto Shot, casting with GCD and cooldowns, combo points, crowd control that really holds you, and the spell visual pipeline.
- Audio: music, ambience and SFX under the client's own selection and crossfade rules, with interior and underwater transitions and zone reverb.
Not built yet
Battlegrounds. Third-party addons are partial: AtlasLoot and Bagnon run, and the addon API fills in as other addons are tried.
Running it
You need a 1.12.1 (build 5875) client install for game data, a vanilla server to connect to, and stable Rust. Any 1.12.1 core works; vmangos is what development runs against, and cMaNGOS and the rest speak the same protocol.
WOW_DATA=/path/to/WoW/Data cargo run --release -p benilla
The server defaults to localhost:3724, the stock realmd auth port. Point WOW_HOST
at any IP or hostname, appending the auth port if yours is remapped
(WOW_HOST=play.example.com:5000). Credentials go in at the login screen, or set WOW_USER /
WOW_PASS to skip it.
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. The interface code under
crates/benilla-app/assets/ui/ is ours, written to the client's own layout and API names so that
the windows look right and 1.12.1 addons find the names they expect.
World of Warcraft is a trademark of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. Our own code is licensed under MIT or Apache 2.0, at your option.