SamandClaude Fable 5.1
e800974806
- on a still frame the world stops redoing settled work — each cut an exact gate, measured with the process pinned to the efficiency cores, where the main thread IS the frame: point lookups go through the water index, a terrain column tests its cell's four fan triangles, not the chunk's 256 (−1.3 ms), the flare march resolves its tile once, the static-world publish and light blob write only on change, billboards, emitter gates (off the new-portal edge), doodad-anim verdicts, the visibility walk, the unit publisher (its filter a named type), a rampless unit's alpha and the stable feed skip when nothing moved, the rig evaluator reuses its scratch, dormant emitters skip their step, child wiring visits pending emitters only, the shade map persists, and the terrain streamer skips its walk once settled; alone parked 25.4 → 21.6–22.8 ms of main thread, 32 → 36–38 fps there with nothing on screen (1979, 1982)
- the UI tick got the same treatment: a solo run's colour rides the material, not the mesh — the glow pulse's one `Assets<Mesh>` write a frame had armed bevy's asset-changed probes over ~44 k `Mesh3d` rows (−1.0 ms); script object ids index a dense map instead of a hash, where every scripted method call starts (−0.7 ms); the draw list is fingerprint-cached, walked every frame and sorted only when it changed (the list a named type); and the instrument that made the gates count at all: the first battery read flat until the probe printed how many frames each gate input had read as changed — `noisy=[cam:0,dbg:299,view:0,win:0,claim:0]` — one dev system took `&mut` on `DebugState` every frame to test a flag, so bevy marked it changed on 299 of 300 frames and silently disarmed every gate reading `debug.is_changed()`; it reads the flag first now, and the counters stay on the probe line (1982)
- two of the new gates were wrong the day they landed and are fixed in the same snapshot: the streamer's settled skip engaged the frame `complete` flipped, with the retained pass still baking the new cells, and froze the undrawn count `presentable()` reads above zero — the loading screen stayed up for good after a `.tele`; it now waits for a paced, presentable, complete world and keeps that count fresh; and the still-frame gates read the camera's `GlobalTransform`, which moves only after propagation — which runs after them — so a teleport frame carried every host's pre-snap verdict across the snap (a lamppost glow due to park kept its clock, over-bright after the `.tele`); the gates read the seat's own `Transform` write too (1982)
- a guild master can design the guild's tabard: the reference's own `TabardFrame.xml` joins the manifest (benilla never had the window), opened only from the wire — the click ladder's TabardDesigner arm now sends `MSG_TABARDVENDOR_ACTIVATE` and the Battlemaster arm its own hello (1861's two deviations retire); the `TabardModel` method table runs over five ints bounded by the `.rdata` table `{170, 17, 6, 17, 51}`, the design previews on the player's own body so the pane and the world show one look, and `Save` runs the fourteen pre-flight checks in the reference's order; the world frame is the reference's own `WorldFrame.xml` too — the framerate readout is live on CTRL-R — and the carve settled its kind: a `Frame` to Lua, a one-shot type, the sole tenant of stratum WORLD, and not "over the UI" when hovered, so world clicks and camera look stay live while its scripts fire (1977, 1983, 1984)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <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.
- Battlegrounds and meeting stones, then the long tail of small features that separates a working client from a finished one.
- 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.