SamandClaude Opus 5
959fb8ba08
- Duels. Challenge another player from their right-click menu, or with `/duel`, and `/forfeit` to give it up. Both popups are there — the challenge you accept or decline, and the warning when you leave the field — with the flag countdown between them, and the outcome printed in chat when someone is knocked out or flees. Read off the reference client's own duel packets and the three globals it keeps client-side, which is why the challenger reads "You have requested a duel." even though the server never echoes that back. - Inspect. Right-click a player and open their paper doll: their nineteen publicly visible equipment slots with icon, name, quality and a linkable item, and their body standing in the pane, which follows along if you retarget while the window is open. No stack counts and no durability — those are not fields another player publishes, which is exactly why the reference client's inspect doll has never shown them either. - Water knows where it stops. Swimming used to trigger in the dry tunnel thirty yards under Stormwind's canal, and in mid-air over Blackrock's lava. A liquid is now the grid the map file actually stores — one wet flag per cell, and the surface height a bilinear over the four corners of the cell you are standing in, the same sample the reference client takes — so the water starts at the bank and its surface sits where your eye puts it. Lava is a liquid you swim in, an indoor liquid asks the building you are inside, and `/liquid` prints every surface claiming your feet and where each one came from. - Creature parts authored to appear only on death — the voidwalker, the banshee, the ooze, the stone elemental, the infernal — were drawing the whole time: material alpha now bakes per animation sequence and the unit lane actually evaluates it. The character and inspect model panes are lit by the reference widget's own single light instead of blowing out white, the rotate arrows spin while you hold them, and the transparent sort ladder had its sign backwards, so overhead names draw over water again instead of being painted out by a canal behind them. Underneath, the protocol writer's 95-verb drawer and its thousand-line spell module split into per-family files — no behaviour change, just a tree you can find things in. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <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.