- a dead player's sky is DeathClouds now — `lightSkyboxID` was named in the schema and read by nobody and `LightSkybox.dbc` was never loaded at all, so a ghost kept the ordinary gradient dome; the shipped data has exactly 5 of 426 LightParams rows carrying a skybox id, every one of them DeathClouds.mdx, reached from the death profile (slot 4) of all 374 Light rows and gated on the ghost bit, with a hardcoded weight of 1.0 that skips the WMO skybox outright; it resolves off the same (map, camera position) seed the atmosphere uses, so the ghost sky and the death-profile fog it hangs over switch on the same frame — and the lane sheds its `wmo_sky` name for `skybox`, no longer being WMO-only - a corpse cannot steer: the reference's two movement-input predicates share a precondition benilla never modelled — `UNIT_FIELD_HEALTH > 0` — so at zero health the keyboard turn and the right-drag close together, exactly as they do inside an Ice Block, while the ghost (health 1) keeps moving; the wow-re §5 round then corrected three byte trails (the mouse turn has its own eight-conjunct predicate, the supposed on-taxi test is the Knockdown animation lockout — set on exactly one of 208 AnimationData rows — and the "charm bit" is the far-sight latch) and added three verified health gates we lacked: the jump IS health-gated, sit and stand are refused while the body reads dead (a feigner too), and a follow tears down only when BOTH predicates drop — we had that wrong in both directions - the walk-gait cross-check folds back confirming `min(walk, run)` and the speed-only animation channel (by a 2,304-function closure census), and finds the trap we lacked: every incoming spline re-authors the gait, and the spline's RUNMODE flag is an INVERSE — a spline marked as a run clears walk mode, one not so marked SETS it — so a charge, taxi, knockback or flee hand-off leaves the body in whatever gait its path was authored with, applied once on the spline's start edge; the post-worldport zero-walk fallback is retracted on a re-run (the ctor's zero is a transient thirty instructions wide, never observable), leaving the plain minimum the bytes compute — the better failure mode too, since a fallback makes a walker silently RUN if a walk speed ever goes missing, where the transcription makes them visibly stop 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.
- 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.