- the display mode is borderless fullscreen by default, and there is no exclusive mode at all — winit ignores exclusive on Wayland, X11's path cannot restore the desktop after a crash, macOS has none, and WoW itself dropped it in 8.0.1; 1.12's `gxWindow` row keeps its name, polarity and default with "0" redefined as borderless, read before the window exists so it is born in the player's mode (a window that does not fill gamescope's nested output is a documented input break, and the recorded workaround is "set the game to fullscreen"), `gxResolution` remembers the windowed size, and the Graphics page grows 1.12's own Windowed Mode checkbox - the UI camera says `Msaa::Off` out loud, because silence there meant Bevy's default 4×: the world arrives on this camera as an already-resolved quad and everything it draws itself is axis-aligned rects, so four samples bought a 4× colour target, a 4× depth texture nothing ever writes, 4× the fill on every quad and a resolve — for a measured difference of MAE ≤ 0.024, all of it quad borders now drawn at their authored crispness, which is also the reference's hard-edged 8-bit direction - `gxMultisample` is a real player setting, and it ships off — the reference's own default: the reference registers no literal, it formats field 21 of the `VideoHardware.dbc` row the GPU matched, a 193-row table that holds nothing above 2 anywhere and whose every 2004-era id misses a modern card, so the fallback rows answer and all of them hold 1; the setting persists, all three world-lane cameras read it on the reference's [1,16] scale rounded down the way its own retry loop steps, and `$WOW_MSAA` survives session-only - two instruments for the tooltip hunt: `rebuild_ui_mesh` — which sorts, clips and re-splits every quad in the interface on any dirty frame — gets a meter carrying total/sort/split/write beside the script phases whose flat reading had stood as an alibi, and `WOW_PROBE_HOVER` sweeps the real cursor across named frames through the real pointer path, pressing nothing: the hover recorder records what a hand does, and this supplies the hand 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.