SamandClaude Opus 5
c48d8c6b7e
- Other players walk the world. A watched player's motion between server updates now runs through the same grounded movement resolve as your own character — same capsule, same colliders, same step-up and ground election — so they follow terrain every frame instead of every packet, and stop at a wall instead of walking into it and being snapped back. Their jumps are swept against the world too, and a standstill jump steered mid-air reports that steer, the one mid-air press the reference client broadcasts rather than defers. - The move relay rebuilt: relayed moves ride a per-unit chain on real time, a due move never jumps ahead of its unit's queue, and SMSG_COMPRESSED_MOVES — the batched carrier the server sends under load — is decoded rather than skipped. Our own send path now matches the reference client's: facing streams while moving, Nagle is off so each packet is one write, and the strafe axis nets so left and right can never ride the same packet. - NPC and quest text speaks the whole $-macro grammar, carved from the reference bytes — your name, class and race, the gendered forms, and the server's live world states — and the same substitution feeds gossip, quest text, the quest log and unit frames. Greetings are a weighted draw, rolled per NPC per open, and a quest giver with no quest to give is no longer clickable, where it used to open a dialog holding nothing but a placeholder greeting. - Spell tooltips finish the reference's line law: cast time and cooldown behind the real passive gate, the required tool or form, the reagents block, the chance-to-X line, a multi-bit equipped-item requirement named properly instead of by raw bits, and a buff's dispel class. - The UI layout engine got a dense, reusable anchor solver, and a change gate that skips the resolve entirely on frames where no layout input moved — in practice, almost every idle frame. Pets are named by their pet number rather than a creature-template entry, so the client asks the query the server can actually answer. And the asset extractor grew a stray-geometry census for tracking down geometry that renders where it should not. This snapshot replaces the six dated `sync` commits that stood here before it, whose subjects said nothing but the date. If you cloned before now: `git fetch && git reset --hard origin/main`. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <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.