- the select screen's ghost is four mechanisms off one roster-row bit, and the rest of them land: the FFX pass swap — the reference builds TWO pass pairs, world and glue, and a ghost row installs the glue DEATH pass over the whole diorama while the character list and buttons composite clean above it; the ghost-gated sun — the scene's light gather is wiped and one hardcoded overhead directional injected, its colours turning out to be Light.dbc's death preset (diffuse (94,153,198), ambient (26,56,85)) rather than the live capture we had parked them as, with the sign settled at the bytes (an authored light already carries one negation, so reusing that convention lights the ghost from underneath); and three glow weights corrected — the glue screens pin 0.30 login / 0.40 living select / 0.15 ghost where we rendered a flat 0.5 everywhere, so login and create get slightly less glow too, a fidelity correction to a value we had never verified - a press brings its window to the front: the mouse-DOWN handler raises the capture-or-hover frame unguarded, the toplevel gate living inside the worker — which is what makes a click on a child raise the window that owns it — and the release never raises; behind it, a frame-by-frame diff against the reference put back what the transcription dropped: toplevel on 47 frames (without it every raise trigger was a silent no-op across the whole interface), the mouse on 16 window bodies (a click on the bank's or merchant's own background was turning the camera or dropping your target), and id= on 81 frames — the slot index a 1.12 addon reads, where GetID() answered 0; a new gate reads our flags off the LOADED engine against the reference's, both directions with a reason each, so the next drift can't hide behind renamed templates - the jump stops being frame-rate dependent: the fall step becomes the reference's closed form (the mean of the endpoint velocities is the exact displacement rate, and both our movers had the error in opposite directions), taking the apex from 1.668 yd at 144 fps and 1.844 at 20 to a flat 1.640 against the analytic 1.640 — a live run apexed at 1.6410; and the knockback's freeze is its PLANTED direction bit, not a velocity test — air control opens exactly while the direction nibble is clear, the launch plants forward whatever its speed, and the bit now rides the wire, which we had never sent at all - the walk-away leash belongs to the OBJECT: the reference's watchdog overwrites the opener's stored range on the player typemask bit alone with (10+4)², so a player-shared quest panel is leashed at 14 yards — not at the 5.56-yard NPC reach, and not never, as two earlier readings had it — while a census of all 14 arming sites confirms every other NPC window already closed at the right distance; the walk-away also sends strictly LESS than the button: an NPC panel closes silently while a share still owes its decline 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: AtlasLoot and Bagnon run, 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.
Where it's going
benilla is done when a 1.12.1 player can do everything here that they could in the original client, it looks and feels the same, and it runs from a download on Windows, Linux and macOS. No dates; the order is what is likely, not a promise.
- The rest of the basics: battlegrounds, guild charters, the stable master, meeting stones, GM tickets, master loot, cinematics and whatever else turns up.
- Addons, options and performance, ongoing.
- The no-brainer fixes from VanillaFixes, SuperWoW and the like.
- Playable downloads for Windows, Linux and macOS. Linux first.
Not planned: other expansions or client versions, Warden (anticheat).
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.