SamandClaude Fable 5
7823f6a47a
- A pool belongs to a room now. Uldaman read as deep underwater because a mushroom cave's pool 186 yards up claimed every position beneath it forever; Undercity's NPCs swam on dry stone because Tirisfal's lake — 95 yards of rock overhead — still answered for them, and the camera took the whole screen underwater with it. Every liquid query (player, camera eye, every unit) is now scoped to the building that owns the water, verified against the real 1.12.1 files at both reported spots. - Druid forms work. A live display change — shapeshift, GM morph, revive — was only ever read at spawn; now the model swaps instantly and a size change eases over the real client's two seconds. A bear-form druid shows no weapon, exactly like the original: only a character body attaches held items. - 126 NPCs across the world were bald and earless. An amulet's display row sits in their head slot, and its "tuck the hair under the helm" mask fired with no helm to tuck under. A mask now needs an actual helm model; the gnome suppliers get their pigtails, ears and earrings back. - The pouring lava in Blackrock Mountain and the Great Forge came back. A prop that spans several rooms (a lava fall is named by up to 19) was culled with only the first room that names it, so it blinked in and out by camera angle. A prop now draws while any of its rooms is visible. - The Undercity entrance lightshafts dim to their authored 10% instead of flooding the throne room with blinding white columns. - An indoor pool fogs with its room now, instead of hazing with the outdoor scene while the wall beside it hazed with the room. Magma and slime take fog too — "fullbright" in the data meant unlit, never unfogged. - Backing the camera out through the Deadmines entrance swirl no longer blanks the whole dungeon: the sealed pocket behind the portal has a detail-only floor the room-finder couldn't stand on, so it declared you outside. A third fallback leg now names the room from the camera-collision faces. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
benilla
A from-scratch World of Warcraft 1.12.1 client in Rust + Bevy, speaking the vanilla protocol to a vmangos server. Every file format and the network protocol are implemented from scratch — no original client code, no third-party WoW crates, and no bundled game assets: benilla reads its data at runtime from your own 1.12.1 install.
What works
- Formats & assets — in-repo readers for the full asset stack (MPQ patch chain, BLP, DBC, ADT/WDT/WDL, M2, WMO), wired into Bevy as an asset source, plus extraction CLI tools.
- World — streamed terrain with the distant 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, glow, and gamma passes.
- Models & animation — GPU-skinned M2s with the full animation controller (cross-fades, one-shots, fidgets), a near feature-complete particle system, ribbons, and animated gameobjects (doors, chests, mailboxes, lifts).
- Characters — customization end to end, the armor-region texture composite, held weapons and sheathing, and mounts.
- Movement & travel — a WoW-feel controller (run/strafe/jump/swim/step-up), networked movement in both directions, a follow-camera with collision, ridden boats and zeppelins, and taxi flights.
- Networking — SRP6 auth through world-session crypto, the object-descriptor mirror into the ECS, and live wire coverage for movement, chat, spells and auras, party, mail, trade, vendors, bank, trainers, quests, loot with group rolls, and death.
- UI — a from-scratch FrameXML + Lua UI engine driving the built-in interface: login and character screens, the full HUD, the classic windows (bags, spellbook, talents, quests, mail, merchant, trade, bank, world map, …), chat, and tooltips.
- Combat — melee with the faithful swing law, ranged and Auto Shot, casting with GCD, cooldowns and the cancel ladder, and the spell-visual pipeline (kits, missiles, impacts, ground rings).
- Audio — music, ambience, and SFX under the client's own selection and crossfade rules, with interior/underwater transitions and zone reverb.
Not built yet
Guilds, the auction house, hunter/warlock pets, duels and inspect, the social panel (friends/who), PvP systems, the macros/options/key-binding screens, and third-party addon loading — the Lua/FrameXML engine currently runs only the built-in UI.
Running it
You need a 1.12.1 (build 5875) client install for game data, a vmangos server to connect to, and stable Rust.
WOW_DATA=/path/to/WoW/Data cargo run --release -p benilla
The server defaults to localhost — point WOW_HOST at any IP or hostname, with an optional
auth port: WOW_HOST=play.example.com:3724. A bare host uses port 13724 (this project's own dev
deploy); a stock vmangos realmd listens on 3724, so you'll usually want the explicit port.
Credentials go in at the login screen, or set WOW_USER / WOW_PASS to skip it.
Contributing
benilla is a solo project and isn't taking pull requests for now. Bug reports and questions are welcome — open an issue, or bring them to Discord. Comments throughout the code cite numbered decision records and method notes from a private development log; the citations won't resolve here, but the reasoning they carry is kept in the comments themselves.
Development happens in that private tree, and this repo is its published export: each commit here is one squashed snapshot of everything that landed since the last one, titled with what changed — not an atomic change, which is why they're large and why there are few of them.
Acknowledgements
The wowemulation-dev community — and warcraft-rs in particular — was an early inspiration and a source of guidance on the client's file formats. benilla's readers ended up written from scratch, but their preservation work made starting far less daunting. And none of this runs without vmangos on the other end of the socket.
Legal
benilla is an independent, fan-made project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Blizzard Entertainment. It contains no Blizzard code or assets and never will; you must provide your own legally-obtained 1.12.1 client for game data. World of Warcraft is a trademark of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.
License
Licensed under either of the Apache License 2.0 or the MIT license, at your option.