- the auction house end to end: right-clicking an auctioneer opens Browse/Bids/Auctions on the server's reply — search, the category tree from your own DBCs, the reference's 50-a-page pager, multi-key sorting (directions corrected at the bytes), bid/buyout, the sell slot with deposit and duration, cancel with its fee popup; prices sit on the reference's own money-frame kit in lined-up columns, the twenty auction messages split refusals-red / outcomes-to-chat, and a won or sold auction reads as a proper mail receipt — the window's Lua re-worded in our own terms after the overlap ratchet caught the first cut leaning on the reference's text - the PvP honor system whole: the Honor tab and the inspect page over a real wire model, with current rank and highest-ever rank correctly two different fields - a day of reported fixes: WASD survives a /logout re-entry, addon settings save on a window close and Cmd+Q (exactly once — a mac close could fire the tail twice), clams open again, random-enchant items name themselves on every surface, the loot window's rows hold their seats with legible counts, idle players stop sinking through building floors, the shooter re-pulls between Auto Shots, portraits loosen ~19% to the client's own aspect-1.0 matrix, and big creatures thump the camera off the CameraShakes table - character select clicks like 1.12 — captions whiten on hover, buttons fire on release, Humans face straight ahead off the stage bone's real yaw, the facing is per-character, and hunter/warlock pets stand beside you at their family-ramp size with their own emitters (the imp's flames), the Voidwalker's sequence-hidden shackles culled - the smaller player-facing set: nameplate on/off rows in Options with the CanAttack category gate (emissaries stop plating), the bonus bar slides up with igBonusBarOpen, the camera's framing height glides on a shapeshift, the open letter evicts the centre seat, the far-band fog hull stops printing a pale horizon stripe at low view distance, the guide arrow is gold with per-source rim art, error text fades through its shadow too, and /convertraid converts the party - README: the auction house and PvP honor move out of "not built yet" 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 — 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.
Not built yet
Battlegrounds. Third-party addons are partial: AtlasLoot and Bagnon run, and the addon API fills in as other addons are tried.
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.