benilla plays the whole game: character creation, questing and professions, dungeons and raids,
battlegrounds and honor, groups, guilds, trade, mail and the auction house, on the stock 1.12
interface and with your addons. It connects to a 1.12.1 server over the original protocol and
reads the game's data from your own 1.12.1 install. Every file format, the network protocol and
the interface engine are written from scratch, with no original client code, no third-party WoW
crates and no bundled game assets.
What the real client does is read at its bytes in
benilla-re, the reverse engineering benilla is built
against, by the same client addresses the comments here cite.
What's inside
- Formats: readers for the whole asset stack (the MPQ patch chain, BLP, DBC, ADT, WDT, WDL, M2
and WMO), wired into Bevy as an asset source.
- World: terrain streamed out to the horizon, portal-culled buildings with interior lighting,
doodads and ground clutter, swimmable water, sky and weather, and the client's own day/night
lighting, fog and gamma.
- Models: GPU-skinned M2s with the full animation controller, particles, ribbons and the spell
visuals, and characters end to end: customization, the armor composite, weapons with their
enchant glows, forms, stealth and mounts.
- Movement: 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 and the object mirror into the ECS,
covering the game from movement and chat through combat, spells, groups and raids, quests,
trade, mail, the auction house and battlegrounds.
- Interface: a FrameXML and Lua engine that runs the stock 1.12 interface off your install's
patch chain, and third-party 1.12 addons: Questie, pfUI, Bagnon, Bartender2 and most others
run. By choice, the options window and the ESC menu follow the Classic Era client's rather than
1.12's.
- Audio: music, ambience and effects under the client's own selection and crossfade rules,
with interior and underwater transitions and zone reverb.
The format readers and the UI engine core are plain Rust with no Bevy in them, and the world
renderer runs with no game attached. docs/MAP.md maps every crate and subsystem,
and docs/DEVIATIONS.md lists everywhere benilla differs from 1.12.1; both are
generated from the code.
Status
Complete and fully playable. What is left:
- The long tail of small features that separates a working client from a finished one, tracked
as issues.
- Addons, options and performance, ongoing.
benilla is a faithful 1.12.1 client and the foundation people build on. There are no prebuilt
downloads: a packaged build, a particular server's changes or anything 1.12.1 never had belongs
in a fork, and forks are welcome. GitHub lists
every public fork.
Not planned: other expansions or client versions, Warden (anticheat).
Running it
benilla builds and runs on macOS, Linux and Windows. You need:
- A 1.12.1 client (build 5875) for the game data, in any locale. benilla only reads it, and
shows its text in the client's language; development runs on English clients.
- A 1.12.1 server. vmangos is what development runs
against; cMaNGOS and the other 1.12.1 cores speak the same protocol. benilla does not answer
Warden, so a server that enforces it disconnects the session after its timeout; vmangos ships
with Warden off.
- Stable Rust and a C compiler, which some dependencies build with: on macOS the
Xcode command line tools, on Linux the ALSA and udev development packages and pkg-config, on
Windows the MSVC build tools that the Rust installer sets up.
WOW_DATA=/path/to/WoW/Data cargo run --release -p benilla
On Windows, in PowerShell:
$env:WOW_DATA="C:\path\to\WoW\Data"; cargo run --release -p benilla
Each release is a tag on the Releases page:
git checkout <tag> first runs that release, and main is the development tip.
WOW_DATA names the install's Data folder; a link to the install named WoW at the repo root
does the same (ln -s /path/to/WoW WoW, or on Windows a junction, which needs no admin rights:
New-Item -ItemType Junction -Path WoW -Target C:\path\to\WoW). The server defaults to
localhost:3724, the stock auth port. Point WOW_HOST at another (WOW_HOST=play.example.com, or
play.example.com:5000 for a remapped port), or set it from the Realmlist button on the login
screen, which remembers it. Credentials go in at the login screen, or set WOW_USER and WOW_PASS
to skip it.
Settings, screenshots and addons live in benilla-config/ at the repo root: a 1.12 addon goes in
benilla-config/AddOns/. docs/CONTRIBUTING.md has the rest, from the
player build to the tests.
Contributing
Issues and pull requests are open. docs/CONTRIBUTING.md says where to
start, what gets in, how a change is judged and what happens to a pull request once it is open.
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, and the stock interface runs off its FrameXML at
runtime. The few files under crates/benilla-app/assets/ui/ are our own, not copies of it:
adapters over stock files, and the settings windows and script error log benilla draws itself.
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 kira audio engine under
third_party/ is vendored under the same two licenses, with its author's copyright notices beside it.
