SamandClaude Fable 5
f3ecb5c968
- a cinematic holds the body while the camera flies: the streaming focus follows the eye — a Tauren's intro opens 1741 yards from the body — so the body's own ground unloaded under it and it fell (z=59.4 to −62 in four seconds, the server yanking it back); it now takes the same hold a teleport takes, released when the focus comes home to a resident tile, and the loading screen stops covering the fly-by, because "the player's ground is missing" is not a load while the eye is deliberately elsewhere; the letterbox measurement prints as an ordinary info line, and scripts/cine.sh plays any one cinematic and prints what the client did to the world while the camera was away
- a cinematic cuts the zone music: the reference asserts exactly what /console EnableMusic 0 asserts, through the same setter — a cut, not a fade, the music pump dead for the duration, resume at +3.000 s — and benilla asserts the runtime flag, never the CVar, or quitting during a 102-second intro would save your music off for good; ambience is deliberately untouched (it has the analogous flag and the cinematic never writes it); the narration has no category at all — its flags route it around every volume slider but not around the Enable Sound Effects gate, so unchecking that silences it — and the listener follows the cinematic camera for the duration
- addons can walk a UI they did not build: GetChildren/GetNumChildren/GetRegions/GetNumRegions land — the basis of the whole reskin genre, and the wall four of the twenty most-installed 1.12 addons died on: pfUI drew nothing before and now paints 495 quads, ShaguDPS 71 → 566, pfQuest 3 → 498 — with the reference's own quirks: the title region is NOT in the list (its creation path never reaches the region linker), hidden regions are returned and counted, oldest first; the Model widget gets its Lua surface (SetModel, SetSequence and siblings, read out of the shipped image, where SetRotation and SetFacing are two names for one slot); and the Minimap carries the nine engine-created Model children no XML declares, built before the frame descent, the ninth being the player arrow Questie indexes as ({Minimap:GetChildren()})[9]
- all seven chat windows come from one template, tabs and scroll buttons included — whether a window is shown has nothing to do with whether its globals resolve, and pfUI reads every piece of that furniture for all seven, unguarded; isDocked only on windows 1 and 2 (the chat-cache's own DOCKED byte), SELECTED_CHAT_FRAME seated beside DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME (the window you last picked vs the one FrameXML prints to), and the four per-window fields ChatFrame_OnLoad seats; two more one-name walls fell — a Button's label answers to its second spelling NormalText, which KLHThreatMeter's column headers die without, and ABANDON_QUEST_WITH_ITEMS is declared because a dialog table is read at load whatever the client later shows, leaving Questie with zero errors of ours — and the addon harness gains --probe/--eval, one addon's VM answering a question in ~5 s instead of a 90 s corpus run
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.