gromandClaude Opus 5
a32963b3f8
A real pointer at the middle of the world map reached nothing: a hook on
`WorldMapButton`'s `OnMouseDown` counted 0 hits from a real click although the
button was shown, mouse-enabled and held the point. A Lua walk of every visible
mouse-enabled frame containing that point answered with exactly one frame, and
it was an unnamed 700x500 `FULLSCREEN_DIALOG` child of `UIParent` — AceGUI's
default container, carrying the title "SoftSpoken Stories" and no content. The
blank login popup grom has reported twice was parked over the centre of the
screen swallowing the map's clicks. One frame, both defects.
`hit_test_name` had been printing `<nothing>` there all along: it answers `None`
for an unnamed frame. Ask what holds the point, not what it is called.
The window is left shown because `AceGUI:Create` shows a container on acquire
and `self.frame:Hide()` is the last line of a `pcall`ed build step, so anything
raising in between leaves it up. The recorded reason was
`AceGUI-3.0.lua:282: attempt to perform arithmetic on local 'argc'`, and the
cause is the realm's own
`Interface\FrameXML\AIO\Dep_LibWindow-1.1\LibStub.lua`, loaded by its
`FrameXML.toc:162` before any addon, which hardcodes `minor = 2` where upstream
parses it — 1.12's Lua 5.0 has no `strmatch`. Every library therefore registers
as minor 2 and the first copy loaded keeps it, while `RegisterWidgetType` still
upgrades individual widgets by their real version: an Ace3v core
(`Fire(self,name,argc,…)`) hosting modern widgets (`Fire(self,name,…)`), whose
first payload value lands in `argc`.
Client side, one real divergence came out of it: `string.split` answered a table,
because BigWigs' `Plugins/SpellRequests.lua` defines `function string:split` and
never calls it, while Ace3's `AceConfigDialog-3.0` and `TreeGroup` both spell
`("\001"):split(uniquevalue)`. `string.split` is now `strsplit` — same function,
same argument order — in the beyond-1.12 string family, with a test pinning the
Ace3 call shape and the arity.
Also: `Step::Drag` moved the cursor eight times without advancing a frame, and a
canvas pans from its `OnUpdate`. It now ticks per move, and the same drag walks
0.5000,0.5000 -> 0.7582,0.3073 -> 0.5080,0.5161 — exactly what driving
`OnMouseDown` by hand produced. The frame between the moves is the gesture.
Four worth recording as dead ends, each of which looked like a client bug: a
verbatim replica of the LibStub file registers correctly; `strfind(34,"(%d+)")`
coerces the number and captures `34` as the reference does; the live function's
`getfenv` is `_G` with every global correct; and a known-good `NewLibrary`
installed on the live table stores the right value. `debug` is absent here, so
the way to ask a Lua function where it came from is to make it raise.
Addon-side edits (gitignored live copies, mirrored to Addon_Ports): the `Fire`
arity shim in both Ace3v AceGUI copies, `issecretvalue` guarded in
OpenMapClassic's vendored Heading widget the way its own Core.lua guards it, and
BigWigs' unused `string:split` removed.
Verified: SoftSpoken `initializationErrors` 0 and `shown=0` at login, nothing
over the map, `--drag` pans it, all three registered options tables open clean
(MasterTradeSkills 4 labels, OpenMapClassic 83, SpokenQuests 6), tabs switch
pages with no raise, session errors 0. fmt and clippy clean; benilla-ui 2119
pass; benilla-app 12 failures, the recorded pre-existing data-golden baseline.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01SgstFWtn1RxEJ5kVrpgYwn
benilla — Everwood graphics
A graphics fork of benilla, the from-scratch World of Warcraft 1.12.1 client in Rust and Bevy by samwhosung. This repository adds an optional modern look on top of it. Every feature has its own switch under Options → Advanced Graphics, and the Classic preset keeps the original 1.12 image.
The goal of this particular fork is baking in certain dlls like Superwow and nampower into Rust to allow the use of common addons on Octowow.
This repository is maintained and will stay open source. Contributions are welcome: open an issue or a pull request.
Graphics features
Lighting and shadows
- Realtime sun shadows for characters and the world, including foliage; moon shadows at night
- Moonlight: at night the moon lights the world (cool, dim, from the moon's place in the sky) on top of the original night colours
- Dynamic building interiors lit by their own fixtures
- Torches, braziers and lamps emit flickering light and cast cube-map shadows; terrain blocks torch light
- Daylight through doors and windows (including Stormwind's rooms and cathedral windows)
- Spell and ground-effect lights, lava glow
- Screen-space ambient occlusion (soft contact shadows)
Sky
- Smooth sky gradient with dithering, soft sun glow
- Procedural star field with a Milky Way
- Sun-lit, detailed clouds
- Zone skyboxes (Burning Steppes, Blasted Lands, Mount Hyjal) and the 1.12
LightSkyboxclear-weather slot
Fog and atmosphere
- Modern fog model: the world fades into the horizon, sun-coloured toward the sun
- Volumetric fog (distance haze)
- Volumetric light: sun and moon shafts marched through the shadow map (god rays through canopies and between buildings, faint moon shafts at night)
- Lamps glowing through fog at night
- Screen-space sun shafts
- Render distance up to 1497 yards
Post-processing
- HDR bloom for fire, lava, spells and lit windows
- Per-zone colour grading (day/night LUTs)
Water
- Enhanced water: refraction, caustics, depth colour, screen-space reflections
- Enhanced city and building water (Stormwind canals)
- Gerstner waves with whitecaps, finer mesh up close
Weather and nature
- Rain: wet ground, puddles, glossy stone, rings on water, shelter under roofs and bridges
- Wind: grass and tree sway with gusts, grass parts around characters
Settings
- One Graphics Preset: Classic / Low / Medium / High / Ultra / Custom (default High)
- Every feature individually switchable on the Advanced Graphics page
Details: LIGHTING.md, WATER.md. Third-party credits, including code ported
from WarcraftXL by iThorgrim: THIRD-PARTY.md.
Licence: same as upstream benilla, MIT OR Apache-2.0.
The upstream benilla README follows.
benilla plays the whole game: character creation, questing and professions, dungeons and raids, battlegrounds and honor, groups, guilds, trade, mail and the auction house, on the stock 1.12 interface and with your addons. It connects to a 1.12.1 server over the original protocol and reads the game's data from your own 1.12.1 install. Every file format, the network protocol and the interface engine are written from scratch, with no original client code, no third-party WoW crates and no bundled game assets.
What's inside
- Formats: readers for the whole asset stack (the MPQ patch chain, BLP, DBC, ADT, WDT, WDL, M2 and WMO), wired into Bevy as an asset source.
- World: terrain streamed out to the horizon, portal-culled buildings with interior lighting, doodads and ground clutter, swimmable water, sky and weather, and the client's own day/night lighting, fog and gamma.
- Models: GPU-skinned M2s with the full animation controller, particles, ribbons and the spell visuals, and characters end to end: customization, the armor composite, weapons with their enchant glows, forms, stealth and mounts.
- Movement: 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 and the object mirror into the ECS, covering the game from movement and chat through combat, spells, groups and raids, quests, trade, mail, the auction house and battlegrounds.
- Interface: a FrameXML and Lua engine that runs the stock 1.12 interface off your install's patch chain, and third-party 1.12 addons: Questie, pfUI, Bagnon, Bartender2 and most others run. By choice, the options window and the ESC menu follow the Classic Era client's rather than 1.12's.
- Audio: music, ambience and effects under the client's own selection and crossfade rules, with interior and underwater transitions and zone reverb.
The format readers and the UI engine core are plain Rust with no Bevy in them, and the world
renderer runs with no game attached. docs/MAP.md maps every crate and subsystem,
generated from the code.
Status
Complete and fully playable. What is left:
- The long tail of small features that separates a working client from a finished one, tracked as issues.
- Addons, options and performance, ongoing.
benilla is a faithful 1.12.1 client and the foundation people build on. There are no prebuilt downloads: a packaged build, a particular server's changes or anything 1.12.1 never had belongs in a fork, and forks are welcome. GitHub lists every public fork.
Not planned: other expansions or client versions, Warden (anticheat).
Running it
benilla builds and runs on macOS, Linux and Windows. You need:
- An English 1.12.1 client (build 5875) for the game data. benilla only reads it.
- A 1.12.1 server with Warden off. vmangos is what development runs against, and it ships with Warden off; cMaNGOS and the other 1.12.1 cores speak the same protocol.
- Stable Rust and a C compiler, because the client's Lua is built from source: on macOS the Xcode command line tools, on Linux the ALSA and udev development packages and pkg-config, on Windows the MSVC build tools that the Rust installer sets up.
WOW_DATA=/path/to/WoW/Data cargo run --release -p benilla
On Windows, in PowerShell:
$env:WOW_DATA="C:\path\to\WoW\Data"; cargo run --release -p benilla
Each release is a tag on the Releases page:
git checkout <tag> first runs that release, and main is the development tip.
WOW_DATA names the install's Data folder; a link to the install named WoW at the repo root
does the same (ln -s /path/to/WoW WoW, or on Windows a junction, which needs no admin rights:
New-Item -ItemType Junction -Path WoW -Target C:\path\to\WoW). The server defaults to
localhost:3724, the stock auth port. Point WOW_HOST at another (WOW_HOST=play.example.com, or
play.example.com:5000 for a remapped port), or set it from the Realmlist button on the login
screen, which remembers it. Credentials go in at the login screen, or set WOW_USER and WOW_PASS
to skip it.
Settings, screenshots and addons live in benilla-config/ at the repo root: a 1.12 addon goes in
benilla-config/AddOns/. docs/CONTRIBUTING.md has the rest, from the
player build to the tests.
Optional, locally built skybox and colour-grading data: Optional/sky-and-grading/.
Contributing
Issues and pull requests are open. docs/CONTRIBUTING.md says where to
start, what gets in, how a change is judged and what happens to a pull request once it is open.
Bugs, questions and ideas are welcome on the Discord too.
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, and the stock interface runs off its FrameXML at
runtime. The few files under crates/benilla-app/assets/ui/ are our own, not copies of it:
adapters over stock files, and the settings windows and script error log benilla draws itself.
World of Warcraft is a trademark of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. Our own code is licensed under
MIT or Apache 2.0, at your option. The three vendored components
under third_party/, the kira audio engine, a Lua 5.1 patched to the 1.12 client's dialect and the
mlua FFI layer with its traceback's global-table search removed, keep their own upstream licenses,
alongside each. Code and techniques ported from other projects
(WarcraftXL, by iThorgrim) are credited file by file in THIRD-PARTY.md.