SamandClaude Fable 5
ee8f9ddfa0
- the glue scene widens only as far as its art goes: none of the seven login dioramas is drawn wider than about 3:2 — measured per texel by `benilla-extract glueextent`, which rasterises every batch into the camera's own tan-space, painting where the reference's alpha-key test passes — so the frame zooms down to the reference's own 16:9 opening (never tighter) and pillarboxes past the aspect the art cannot fill, instead of showing the clear colour past the backdrop's slanted edges; 4:3 stays byte-identical - the character screen opens on whoever you last logged in as: the reference's `lastCharacterIndex` CVar, written at Enter World and only there — clicks and arrow keys never touch it, which is what makes the value mean "last logged in" rather than "last clicked" — restored on every character-list rebuild and clamped into range - spam-hovering tooltips stops costing 2 ms: two write sites gave up naming their node and re-derived the whole layout graph (1,812 µs against the ledger's 44, on 919 of 1,262 resolves) — the wrap pin now touches the one region it wrote, and re-pointing a tooltip at the button under the cursor retargets the node's edges in place instead of throwing the cached graph away - two corrections off the project's first GPU-bound report (a Steam Deck at 94% GPU busy on 8.4 W of a 15 W budget, the memory-stall signature): `farclip` ships the reference's registered 350 instead of the clamp's 777 — the value also sizes terrain residency, so 777 streamed, held and drew 4.8× the area — and BLP textures upload WoW's own DXT blocks verbatim the way the reference does, instead of decoding to RGBA8 at 8× the bytes of DXT1; the terrain slider still reaches 777, and the lanes that read texels on the CPU (terrain arrays, the character-skin compositor) stay decoded and say why 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.