SamandClaude Fable 5
d1931eed1d
- the jitter meter measures the palette and the pixels, not just the pose: `pal` probes the rows the vertex stage actually blends (the old bone columns read a matrix the GPU never sees), `SCREEN` carries them to viewport pixels by the shader's own arithmetic, `camrot` watches the camera's rotation where only its translation had been vouching for "bit-stable", and `WOW_JITTER_RAW` dumps one bone's series unaggregated — rotations too, since a translation can be smooth while its frames are not - `WOW_FIXED_DT=<ms>` pins the animation advance so a screenshot burst measures the render rather than its own stall — arming on the wall clock, because during load the app runs ~385 updates a second and a pinned clock reached "90 seconds" in 14 s, photographing an empty world - `benilla-visual flow` estimates the whole window's motion by least squares over every pixel (noise floor 0.0000 px on static regions, and its brightness-constancy limit is measured and stated: invalid on a lit deforming body), `edge` reads a silhouette's sub-pixel crossing renormalised against the lighting with an honest ±0.5 px floor, `WOW_TWIST_GAP` pins a yaw gap so the body counter-twist is exercised at all — every earlier "removing it changed nothing" had measured a pass that never ran — and `WOW_DITHER` adds the dither the frame's 8-bit output has never had, off by default because the reference's framebuffer was undithered - hovering a MACRO action slot shows one white line, its name — the reference's macro leg renders exactly that and no more, in its "normal" white, where ours was a `_ => Ok(())` from before macros shipped; and `WOW_MSAA=8` is refused with a loud warning instead of panicking the render thread, through one parser both world-camera spawners now share 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.