SamandClaude Fable 5
b8758d0b21
- the four world broadcasts decode and land — a shutdown countdown, the civilian-kill alarm, a defense-tower capture and the whisper-cap refusal all reached benilla as unhandled opcodes; `SMSG_SERVER_MESSAGE` carries a row id and a fill, never a finished line, so `ServerMessages.dbc` ships (the five sentences a shutdown has, plus the client's own `[%d]: %s` row-missing fallback, which is mechanism, not an error path); the two defense broadcasts are CHANNEL lines, not system lines — delivered once per joined channel whose row carries DEFENSE, the LocalDefense copy zone-matched against the PARENT area while the text names the packet's own — so a character in neither channel sees nothing, faithfully, and since nothing auto-joins WorldDefense in 1.12 an Eastern Plaguelands tower capture reaches only players standing there unless they typed /join; the wow-re cross-check then made the length prefix load-bearing — the client borrows a pointer into the receive buffer and composes NULL on an overrun, so an overrunning length is a refusal here too: the packet drops with a log line, nothing displayed - `BankButtonIDToInvSlotID` is carved: `isBag` is a TYPE test, not truthiness — `lua_isnumber` refuses every non-number tag without ever loading the payload, so `true` takes the same arm as `nil` while `0` and `"1"` take the bag arm — the function is TOTAL (our out-of-range 0 was an invention; the only compares in all 118 bytes are on `lua_isnumber`'s return), and the +59/+39 arithmetic stands confirmed, byte-identical to `ContainerIDToInventoryID`'s second arm - a deliberate right-drag turn no longer stands you while seated — the observation was right and our attribution was wrong: the body-facing commit is refused by two independent gates and the stand arm is skipped outright while the button is held; what stands you is the RELEASE, a press under 200 ms with under 2.25 degrees of yaw dispatched as a right-CLICK whose interact reaches `SetStandState(0)` — this lands the deletion half, with the click's own stand held for one more wow-re answer - a ghost walks through closed doors — the whole mechanism is one instruction image-wide, reading bit 15 through the sign flag to answer "not a collision candidate" for a DOOR when the traced body is a player in ghost form; the bit is a property of whose trace it is, not of the door, so the exclusion rides the two mover-only casts and the set is empty on every living frame — the particle snap, the precipitation probe, the mouse pick and the creature conform keep the door's collider untouched, exactly as the binary leaves them 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: AtlasLoot and Bagnon run, 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.
Where it's going
benilla is done when a 1.12.1 player can do everything here that they could in the original client, it looks and feels the same, and it runs from a download on Windows, Linux and macOS. No dates; the order is what is likely, not a promise.
- Battlegrounds and meeting stones, then the long tail of small features that separates a working client from a finished one.
- Addons, options and performance, ongoing.
- The no-brainer fixes from VanillaFixes, SuperWoW and the like.
- Playable downloads for Windows, Linux and macOS. Linux first.
Not planned: other expansions or client versions, Warden (anticheat).
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.