SamandClaude Fable 5
e9e38bf6ec
- corpses render: a corpse create spawned a real entity, latched its guid for the reclaim send, and drew nothing — one missing EntityKind variant folded it into the catch-all and four downstream lanes then failed by default, not even the debug cube fired; the reference forks once, on the bones flag: a fresh body builds a character composite from the corpse's OWN appearance bytes and 19 item slots through the same compositor a living player is dressed by (its own hide-helm/hide-cloak bits honoured, the ranged slot never dresses, and weapons never dress because the client looks a packed display word up as a guid — we reproduce the outcome, not the dead lookup), while a bone pile takes its race and sex's DeathSkeleton, sixteen of which ship; the pose is one settled arm — Dead, or Drowned when the body lies more than 0.66666669 yd under a liquid surface — and a corpse is not a unit, so clicking one no longer sends a selection for a guid no unit owns
- a lit particle takes its MODEL's committed light node, not the sky's: indoors the reference lights an object's particles from the object's own node — the footprint's baked floor colours on the fixed interior axis plus the room's placed lights — never the day/night sun; a particle quad carries exactly one normal, world up, one constant per draw, so the whole node collapses to three floats, published off the same fold the model's mesh renders from so a mesh and its own particles can never disagree about the room they stand in; in Onyxia's Lair the 78 lit falling-rock emitters on the 26 anchors that classify interior now take the room's light
- and that lit lane is FIXED FUNCTION, not the mesh's soft SH curve: the shipped client null-binds both shader slots for a particle batch and re-zeroes the shader mask at the head of every batch, so a model and its own particles share the same committed light words and legitimately differ in the curve applied to them — the mesh's wrapping lobe against the hardware's max(N·L, 0) is 0.900 vs 0.869 on the key axis, up to the three nearest room lights arrive diffuse-only under GL's own 1/(0.7d + 0.03d²) falloff (a light at or below the emitter cannot reach it at all), and the clamp sits on the product, never the multiplier, because it is GL that clamps the lit vertex colour
- the cinematic letterbox has no aspect test in it: CinematicFrame.lua's if guards a recompute, not whether there are bars — below 4:3 the reference's bar textures simply stand at their declared 1024x128 on the client's native 1024x768 sheet, which is height/6, the same formula evaluated at exactly 4:3 — so one expression covers every window shape, min((h − min(w/2, h))/2, h/6): a 2:1 picture when wide, bars at 4:3 too; and a shown keyboard frame swallows EVERY key, not the ten names the host used to feed it — you could walk around underneath your own intro; the proof is the reference's own handler, which has to RunBinding("SCREENSHOT") by hand to get one key back; ESC still skips, and a W already held when the shot starts keeps running, which is faithful too
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.