- a unit's pick geometry is every model chained to it — body, held items, mount — one candidate per root resolving to the same unit, which is how the reference registers its pick (it walks the attachment tree and registers each model); Naxxramas' floating weapons could only be selected by their name plate before (no body, no candidate), and every armed unit gains its gear as clickable surface (our own body 12 → 21 tested parts); the broad phase stays the body's sphere, so a very long polearm on a small body is the named residual - the selection ring's writer has two branches and we had transcribed one: a model whose stand box is degenerate (zero extent in x and y) rings at the literal 1.2 × scale — 2.7 yd under a trigger creature — instead of `sqrt(0.5·sqrt(dx²+dy²))` = 0 clamped to an invented 0.05 floor; both invented fallbacks are gone - an HTML book image with no width/height is its art's texel square (one texel = one FrameXML unit, bit-for-bit the `<AbsDimension>` converter), not the rest of the page — *A Treatise on Military Ranks* drew its crest twice too big and stretched to the page's aspect; a texture-size oracle answers off the same decoder the renderer draws with, and an unfloated height-less `<IMG>` reserves its art's height in the flow; 797 shipped textures swept, exactly two zero-size axes move and neither is visible - the dev debug panel killed the client on open with "Attachments have differing sample counts": Bevy's 2-D depth texture is keyed on the render target alone, so two Camera2ds on one window at different MSAA counts cannot both be valid, and the egui overlay camera had silently kept the default 4× after the player-UI camera went to Off; it now says `Msaa::Off`, and a preflight check reports any two 2-D cameras that disagree on a shared target, every run 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.