benilla — Everwood graphics

A graphics fork of benilla, the from-scratch World of Warcraft 1.12.1 client in Rust and Bevy by samwhosung. This repository adds an optional modern look on top of it. Every feature has its own switch under Options → Advanced Graphics, and the Classic preset keeps the original 1.12 image.

This repository is maintained and will stay open source. Contributions are welcome: open an issue or a pull request.

Graphics features

Lighting and shadows

Realtime sun shadows for characters and the world, including foliage; moon shadows at night
Dynamic building interiors lit by their own fixtures
Torches, braziers and lamps emit flickering light and cast cube-map shadows; terrain blocks torch light
Daylight through doors and windows (including Stormwind's rooms and cathedral windows)
Spell and ground-effect lights, lava glow
Screen-space ambient occlusion (soft contact shadows)

Sky

Smooth sky gradient with dithering, soft sun glow
Procedural star field with a Milky Way
Sun-lit, detailed clouds
Zone skyboxes (Burning Steppes, Blasted Lands, Mount Hyjal) and the 1.12 LightSkybox clear-weather slot

Fog and atmosphere

Modern fog model: the world fades into the horizon, sun-coloured toward the sun
Volumetric fog with sun and moon light shafts
Lamps glowing through fog at night
Screen-space sun shafts
Render distance up to 1497 yards

Post-processing

HDR bloom for fire, lava, spells and lit windows
Per-zone colour grading (day/night LUTs)

Water

Enhanced water: refraction, caustics, depth colour, screen-space reflections
Enhanced city and building water (Stormwind canals)
Gerstner waves with whitecaps, finer mesh up close

Weather and nature

Rain: wet ground, puddles, glossy stone, rings on water, shelter under roofs and bridges
Wind: grass and tree sway with gusts, grass parts around characters

Settings

One Graphics Preset: Classic / Low / Medium / High / Ultra / Custom (default High)
Every feature individually switchable on the Advanced Graphics page

Details: LIGHTING.md, WATER.md. Third-party credits, including code ported from WarcraftXL by iThorgrim: THIRD-PARTY.md. Licence: same as upstream benilla, MIT OR Apache-2.0.

The upstream benilla README follows.

benilla

A from-scratch World of Warcraft 1.12.1 client in Rust and Bevy

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, PvP honor and battlegrounds.
UI: a from-scratch FrameXML + Lua engine that runs the client's own stock interface off your install's patch chain, 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).
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 long tail of small features that separates a working client from a finished one.
Addons, options and performance, ongoing.
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, stable Rust and a C compiler (the Lua is built from source; on macOS the Xcode command line tools, on Linux the ALSA and udev development packages). 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.

Optional, locally built skybox and colour-grading data: Optional/sky-and-grading/.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are open. docs/CONTRIBUTING.md says what gets in and how a change is judged. Bugs, questions and ideas are welcome on the Discord too.

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 stock interface runs off your own install's FrameXML at runtime; the handful of files under crates/benilla-app/assets/ui/ are our own adapters and developer frames, not copies of it.

World of Warcraft is a trademark of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. Our own code is licensed under MIT or Apache 2.0, at your option. The two vendored components under third_party/ — the kira audio engine, and a Lua 5.1 patched to the 1.12 client's dialect — keep their own upstream licenses, alongside each. Code and techniques ported from other projects (WarcraftXL, by iThorgrim) are credited file by file in THIRD-PARTY.md.

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