gromandClaude Opus 5
c315fb4f35
The Options row shipped last commit said the setting needed a relaunch.
It does not have to. The reference's "enabled upon restart" is about its
TEXTURES, not its CVars — both register with `flags = 1`, live — because
its sampler state was baked inside each `TextureCreate` (`0x449ae0`) and
it kept no list of live textures. Ours can be re-stamped in place.
Two things make it possible, and neither is new work:
- A governed sampler now wears `POLICY_SAMPLER_LABEL`, written by the one
constructor `TexFilterSetting::descriptor`. That is the `applyGlobal`
split the reference draws, made legible at runtime: terrain, WMO/M2 and
the liquid sheets take the policy; weather sprites, the minimap, glue,
Lua widgets, the sky and decals keep their own mode. All four governed
lanes went through that constructor, so a lane cannot forget the label
and silently opt itself out of every later change.
- Extracting a `RENDER_WORLD`-only `Image` takes its *pixels* and leaves
the asset behind (`take_gpu_data` is an `Option::take` on `image.data`).
So every resident texture's own descriptor is still readable in the main
world, for nothing — there is no ledger to keep and none to go stale.
The policy itself stops being a `OnceLock` and becomes one atomic word
plus a revision, so it can be published again on every write and both
halves of the refresh can key off the same number in the same frame:
`refresh_policy_samplers` (render world, `ExtractSchedule`, before every
Prepare) swaps `GpuImage::sampler`, and `invalidate_materials::<M>` raises
`AssetEvent::Modified` so bind groups that captured the OLD sampler are
built again. `static_gx` carries two samplers of its own and rebuilds its
cached cell bind groups in place rather than dropping them — clearing the
cache would be one line, but a region with no GPU state does not draw, so
every building in view would blink out and trickle back under the bake
budget.
Measured, not asserted. `WOW_CVAR_LATE=<name>=<value>` is new here: it
writes CVars *after* the scene has settled, then re-settles the image
around them. A latched lever and a live one give the same boot picture, so
no boot-time A/B can tell them apart. On the Elwynn vista:
anisotropic 16 at boot vs 16 written late:
0 of 1,440,000 pixels differ
and the control that proves the harness is not doing the work (boot 16,
written 16 again late, so no refresh runs but the re-settle is still paid)
is byte-identical to a plain boot. The cost of the change is 873 samplers,
75 material bind groups and 264 static_gx cell bind groups, once; nothing
is re-uploaded, since the pixels never move.
The first run of that A/B was NOT identical — 6.7% of the frame, a dapple
of stale tree shadow on a road that was otherwise correct. That is
`CutoutShadowCasterMaterial`, which deliberately reuses the forward pass's
own leaf handle and so holds a governed sampler, and which lives in
`benilla-app` rather than the engine. Hence the shape the invalidation
took: a public `invalidate_materials::<M>` each crate registers beside its
own `MaterialPlugin`, published through the world-API wall with the record
that says why (the engine naming every material type in the program is the
inversion that wall exists to stop). Forgetting one is silent in exactly
that way — a bind group built after the change is right and one already
cached is wrong — so the capture A/B is written into `docs/GRAPHICS.md` as
the check for this feature, not a unit test pretending to be one.
The Options row keeps its deferral to Apply, now for the real reason: the
commit is cheap once and silly sixteen times, which is what a drag across
the groove would ask for.
Verified: ALL GATES GREEN (520 s); `benilla-app --lib` against the install
at the exact 269-failure baseline, set-identical by `comm`.
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.