SamandClaude Fable 5
c1ba444119
- The main menu bar's two empty recesses fill. The micro menu — the eight arched buttons: character, spellbook, talents, quest log, socials, world map, main menu, help — sits in the dark panel between the page arrows and the bags, transcribed from the reference's own layout: the character button wears your portrait, a button holds itself down while its panel is up, and the talent button appears at level 10. The latency meter fills the one slot the bar art leaves transparent for exactly it, tinted green/yellow/red on the reference's 300/600 ms thresholds and drawn UNDER the bar art, seen through its window, the way 1.12 actually does it. The socials and main-menu buttons find their panels one snapshot later; help still waits. - The UI explains itself on hover: 1.12 ships its detailed two-line tooltips ON — a FrameXML default, not the opt-in extra it is often remembered as — so the micro buttons, your own portrait, the XP bar, the five bag buttons and the ping meter all answer a hover with the reference's own explanations. - The PvP flag, end to end: crossed swords on the player, target and party frames, driven by the two descriptor bits the wire actually carries, and `/pvp` speaks — the yellow toast plus the system chat line, the OFF sentence being the one that warns the flag lingers for five minutes. It really does linger: turning it off waits out the server's timer, which looks like a bug and is the reference. - Quest markers stopped freezing. The grey `!` over a questgiver above your level goes gold the moment you ding, an NPC re-entering view is asked afresh instead of wearing a session-old answer, and the marker drops when the questgiver bit goes off — the re-ask triggers mirror the reference's own set, plus one named addition (your own level changing). - Water and heights: swimming downhill no longer bounces between swim and fall ten times a second — the surface line is a two-sided constraint, so the swimmer settles with the river instead of being left behind by it. And collision height is per-unit now, read from the unit's own model: a gnome used to swim with a third of a yard of water over her head because five depth lines were quoting a human's number. - A round of pixel honesty in text and chat: the newest chat line no longer wears a wider drop shadow than every line above it (shadows move in whole pixels now), keeps its descenders, and hover boxes stop painting over the chat body. The chat input's history browse survives programmatic edits, a failed script chunk warns instead of vanishing, and recall deepens to 64 lines. Idle animation got honest too: a model's idle is Stand resolved through its own lookup table — never file order, which had the duel flag bobbing on its spawn clip — and an armed idle is culled on the box its animation authors, not the bind pose, so the flag stops vanishing at most camera angles. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <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.