SamandClaude Fable 5
6356bc8f43
- Enter World stops freezing the character screen: from the click, the select image stayed on the glass ~100 ms because the loading cover could not draw until the state-flip frame — which cost 60 ms, 57 of it render+present: the world camera's first render of a 3000-entity world on cold pipelines, plus fifteen booth cameras waking on the very frame that owes the glass a cover; the glue now yields the glass on the click's own frame and the world camera (booths with it) holds off until the cover has presented — flip frame 60 → 43 ms and off the critical path — measured by the new `WOW_FRAME_PHASES` instrument, which stamps every phase of a frame and prints the render+present remainder no in-schedule stamp can see - switching to a character you haven't clicked before no longer flashes somebody else's body in their stage — the background swapped the frame the selection changed while the character waited for its whole assembly, so whichever won is what the screen showed (53 ms of the human standing in the orc's stage, and the reverse under a stage still loading); stage and character now commit as a PAIR, loads still starting on the click and an empty stage still swapping at once — on the same cold walk, eight selections make eight rebakes, every one the right body in the frame its stage lands, where before it was twelve with four of them wrong - the bank's six bag buttons repaint again — the stock UI repaints them only on `PLAYERBANKSLOTS_CHANGED`, which benilla fired for the vault's 24 slots alone, so a bag dropped in never appeared and one moved between slots stayed drawn in the one it left; the lock clear becomes its own system ordered ahead of BOTH feeds (resolve, then push, then fire), ending the stuck-grey icon — and `GetInventoryItemCount` is carved as not-the-stack-count: an EMPTY slot answers 1 (a sentinel, not a count), a container past the slot cutoff answers a literal 0 before any lookup (the whole answer to the stray digit on the bank's bag buttons), and an equipped bag answers the SUM of its contents gated on a DBC bit our class-11 guess missed twice — including the Soul Bag, so a warlock's shard count never showed - the bags close by the law: `BAG_CLOSED` is the only thing in all of FrameXML that hides an open bag window, and benilla never fired it, so a window outlived its bag in both bands (equipped and bank); the carve pins the condition — the bag changed AND the slot was occupied — so a swap fires BAG_CLOSED then BAG_UPDATE with the slot occupied throughout, an unequip fires it with the announce suppressed for exactly that transition, and two identical empty bags exchanged between slots still close both windows, because the diff is on the bag's own guid rather than the container state; `PLAYERBANKSLOTS_CHANGED` meanwhile turns out to carry NO arguments — a census of all 485 dispatcher call sites — the slot travels in how many times it fires, and every bank button repaints from its own slot id 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: 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.