gromandClaude Opus 5 e61976bc0e formats: the world-map goldens, and a nondeterministic continent lookup
The four map tables against the realm's own files. One real bug, and three
findings that are the realm's data rather than ours.

**`WorldMapArea::continent` was a coin flip.** It `find`s the `area_id == 0`
row for a map id, and 5875 had exactly one per map so order never mattered. The
realm ships two for map 0 — 14 "Azeroth" and its own 694 "World" — and the
lookup iterated the `by_id` `HashMap`, whose order is seeded per process. So
`continent(0)` answered Azeroth or World depending on the run. Now it walks
file order, which is the reference's own walk and picks 1.12's row; the test
asserts 14 and passes eight runs in a row where it used to flip.

- **WorldMapArea** 51 -> 132 rows loaded, of 175 in the file. The 43 dropped are
  dropped on purpose: `AreaName` empty, `AreaID` 0, the whole rect zero, one per
  instance map (33 Shadowfang through 533 Naxxramas, then the realm's 800s). An
  instance has no continent art — but `AreaID == 0` is exactly what
  `ui_world_map.rs:146` reads as "this row is a continent", so keeping them
  would put 43 unnamed continents in `GetMapContinents()`. `str_at` folds an
  empty string to `None` and the row falls out; the test now pins that as
  deliberate. The realm's third *named* continent is 694 "World", a second sheet
  over map 0 whose art ships (patch-M) but whose four rect columns are all zero
  — the only named row like that. `map_proj::zone_uv` already refuses a zero
  span and answers 0.0 instead of dividing, so that sheet puts a blip in the
  corner rather than NaN.

- **WorldMapContinent** 2 -> 3 rows. The new row's `MapID` is 42, which the same
  patch *deleted* from `Map.dbc` along with the rest of 1.12's dev test maps
  (13 "Testing", 25 "Scott Test", 29 "CashTest", 37 "Azshara Crater", 42
  "Collin's Test", 44 "<unused> Monastery"). It is inert rather than broken: the
  continent list comes from `WorldMapArea`, and this table is only ever reached
  by `wmc.get(map_id)` for maps 0 and 1, so nothing asks for continent 42.

- **The zone bitmaps are repainted.** `Azeroth.zmp` and `Kalimdor.zmp` have the
  realm's own copies in patch-3 and patch-4, and every id they write is a
  **zone** where 1.12 wrote sub-areas and left the client to roll them up.
  Azeroth: 1874 labelled cells over 34 distinct ids, all zone-level, against
  2630 over 334 of which 310 were sub-areas (Northshire Valley, Crystal Lake,
  Fargodeep Mine). After the one-hop rollup `ui_world_map.rs:193` applies, 1280
  cells agree, 534 name a *different* zone, 816 lost a zone and 60 gained one —
  a redrawn map, not a mechanical flattening. Nothing of ours needed changing:
  the rollup is a no-op on an already-flat grid. The test asserts the structural
  claim behind the number (every labelled cell is a top-level zone), which 1.12's
  own file would fail, so a decode slip cannot hide inside a re-recorded count.

- **WorldMapOverlay** 526 -> 707, and not an extension: 360 ids added, 179
  removed, 347 survivors given a different texture and rect. None of this
  table's numbering is 1.12's, so only the joins are worth asserting.

`dbc_diff` gained `--row=N`, which dumps a row from the winning copy *and* the
baseline — the only way to read a row the realm deleted, which is how the six
test maps above got their names.

benilla-formats: 25 -> 21 failures, no regressions.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01SgstFWtn1RxEJ5kVrpgYwn
2026-10-31 19:20:54 -06:00
2026-07-24 14:27:01 +07:00
2026-07-24 14:27:01 +07:00
2026-10-16 14:26:06 +00:00
2026-09-27 15:10:12 +07:00

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 LightSkybox clear-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

A complete World of Warcraft 1.12.1 client, written from scratch in Rust and Bevy

Discord YouTube devlog License

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.

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