SamandClaude Fable 5
c887170b37
- The social window: friends, ignore and `/who`, in the reference's own two-level arrangement with its inner tabs and per-row right-click menus. The lists ride the real wire — guid-keyed with no names, resolved through the name cache, and capped at 50 friends / 25 ignores because those are the client's own caps — and the ignore list does its actual job: an ignored speaker's chat is dropped silently, a whisper additionally tells the sender, and a duel challenge is auto-declined. Guild ships as a disabled tab, which is what a guildless character sees. - The escape menu: ESC's last rung finally opens something. The game menu lands at the reference's own size and ladder, and leaving works — logout and quit with the server owning the clock (instant at an inn, refused in combat, or the 20-second countdown), narrated by the real camp/quit dialogs. While the menu holds the center nothing else opens, and the bag bar greys out under it. - Items on the action bar act like items. An equipped trinket was a dead button; the reference's use law is two stages — not equippable means use, equippable and already worn means use in place — over its exact search order (equipment first, then the bags, then the backpack, then the keyring; never the bank). What can go on the bar is now the reference's own two filters, byte-read: an item with an on-use spell or one you can equip, and no passive spells — and dropping a passive there speaks the real client's own line, "You can't put a passive ability in the action bar." - A quest-starter item opens its quest instead of "The item was not found." The question goes to the item's own guid, never through item-use — which the server refuses for every one of the 215 quest-starter items — and refusing the quest says what the client says, then closes the window. - For the toolbox: a pixel pick that reports everything under the cursor all the way back, a lens that says which render phase a draw landed in, and switches that separate "discarded" from "lost depth" from "never drawn" — built while cornering a flickering tent, whose fix ships in the next snapshot. 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.