SamandClaude Fable 5
80551cab5e
- from inside a building the open-world water outside draws only through a doorway you can see, as terrain and trees already did — the Caverns of Time lake is gone from the cavern's ceiling: there was never a second visibility lane for open-world liquid (the old deferral said "it already has an authority"; a sweep of every visibility writer found none, so Bevy's frustum test was the lake's only gate), an ADT liquid layer is tagged exterior scene at spawn and the existing window cull owns it, one 33 yd chunk layer at a time — which the reference's bytes then confirmed is its unit too (`CChunkLiquid`, reachable only from the per-window walk, a sealed room's supply discarded not deferred); a building's own pool also rides the Map Objects toggle now, so switching buildings off no longer leaves the canals hanging in the air - the Thunder Bluff elevators and every other Kalimdor lift were invisible for the whole session whenever you logged in on that continent: the lift arm snapshotted the current map one stage before the login frame had written it, so every lift compared itself against map 0 and hid as off-map — a lift carries no map at all now (it is only ever streamed to players standing on its own map), the off-map term stays for the boats it was written for, and `WOW_LIFT_CENSUS` prints each transport's arm state, cycle and visibility (13 transports, 11 hidden → 0) - the lightning across Razorgore's room and Chain Lightning's mob-to-mob hop drew as hairlines: the chain renderer took each hop's cross-section as the world-horizontal perpendicular, where the reference takes `(−d.y, d.x, 0)` in eye space — the ribbon is view-plane aligned and keeps its authored 2 × halfWidth yards at every angle, so a long level beam watched from its own plane no longer thins to a line (the "a hop seen end-on genuinely collapses" note was wrong and is gone) - a display that names a model builds even when it draws no batch — Naxxramas' Unholy Axe / Swords / Staff are an invisible stalker holding a Monster weapon, and the held weapon had nowhere to hang; the same gate was keeping 43 emitter-only GameObjects dark (house and blacksmith smoke, Ironforge's lava steam, Stratholme's embers, every firework), and a name sits at the authored PlayerName attachment instead of at the feet; and a vendor's foot-shuffle on turning to you now blends the whole way in and runs to its own clip window — a 500 ms step on 1100 of 1130 shipped shuffle records — where the latch had tested the gap left against a band sixty times too wide, and nothing ever ended the step 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.