- spells shake the camera: `SpellEffectCameraShakes.dbc` loads beside `CameraShakes.dbc` as the group table, `SpellVisualKit` field 14 is the shake column (58 of 1772 kits carry one — War Stomp, Thunder Clap, Kodo Stomp, the ~50 Knockdown/Slam/Charge impacts, every summon, Sapper Charge, Earthquake, Sapphiron's death), and the kit shake fires exactly once per play from the first effect node's one-time arm pass (`0x620e11`), the same leg that plays the kit sound one field over — the older "fires only if nothing else did" reading would have silenced every kit with a populated effect slot; `$SHK` markers fire from GameObject and DynamicObject hosts only (the titan chest, the bomb wagon); one deliberate deviation — the reference reads a bone-attached node's position twelve instructions before it is written, so 26 of its 58 shake kits shake at the world origin and are culled by the 80 yd cut, which is an uninitialised field, not a design; 21 of 24 presets now have a live producer, up from 6 - the sound keeps playing when the window loses focus, if you want it to: 1.12 mutes everything on `WM_ACTIVATE` and offers no way out, so benilla ships that as the default (`Sound_EnableSoundWhenGameIsInBG` "0") and puts an Audio-page checkbox on it — a gate appended LAST in the main-track chain, downstream of every tap, so an unattended capture still records; wow-re's round settled that music is not exempt and that it is a mute, not a pause - a building's far side no longer draws through its own walls: the camera-inside leg has three passes and we had one and a half — Pass 2 admits an exterior-shell group only against a frustum clipped to ONE deferred window (we marked every such group visible against the full view, under a comment calling it a benign over-draw), and Pass 3, which we had none of, draws the 24 `0x10000` groups (14 in Stormwind, 6 across Dire Maul, Razorfen's four 450–520 yd shells) from anywhere, frustum-tested on both legs by byte-identical setup; there is no antiportal branch in 5875 and no such flag in its data (815/815 roots and 5220/5220 groups censused, no bit above 18 ever set) - the macro window is the reference's own `Blizzard_MacroUI`, and `GlobalStrings.lua` — line 1 of the reference's own toc — was missing from our manifest entirely (the app loaded it out of band at startup, so the client was right and every harness that loaded the manifest was not); exactly one `<OnLoad>` runs, the most-derived, because `SetScript` releases the slot before it looks at the new body — which is why the reference re-states the template's width line in tab 1 and not tab 2 Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <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: AtlasLoot and Bagnon run, 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.
Where it's going
benilla is done when a 1.12.1 player can do everything here that they could in the original client, it looks and feels the same, and it runs from a download on Windows, Linux and macOS. No dates; the order is what is likely, not a promise.
- Battlegrounds and meeting stones, then the long tail of small features that separates a working client from a finished one.
- Addons, options and performance, ongoing.
- The no-brainer fixes from VanillaFixes, SuperWoW and the like.
- Playable downloads for Windows, Linux and macOS. Linux first.
Not planned: other expansions or client versions, Warden (anticheat).
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.