benilla

A complete World of Warcraft 1.12.1 client, written from scratch in Rust and Bevy

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'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.

Platforms

Desktop and Android build from the same source tree. Status below is what has actually been run and fixed against on real hardware, not just what compiles in CI.

• Windows — actively developed against. benilla-config now resolves to the running user's Documents folder through the Windows shell API (SHGetKnownFolderPath), rather than assuming an XDG-style path the way Linux does, including a follow-up fix for a Windows API type mismatch the first pass got wrong (a null handle, not a zero integer). Builds in CI (windows-latest) and has been run for real.
• Android — the primary mobile target, and the platform with the most fixes behind it so far: the missing INTERNET permission (nothing connects without it — cargo-apk has no manifest-merging step, so the permission list in benilla-android/Cargo.toml is the entire source of truth for the APK's manifest) is fixed, WOW_DATA defaults to the app's own media directory, a Bevy default-feature conflict between game-activity and the native-activity this project actually targets is resolved, and a signed release APK builds from CI. See Touch input below for the control scheme. Compile-and-link and signed packaging are proven; nobody has confirmed a full play session on a device or emulator yet, so treat it as "should work," not "confirmed."
• Linux (Ubuntu) — builds in CI (ubuntu-latest) the same as upstream, and is presumed fine since it's the primary Bevy development target — no Linux-specific bugs have come up because none have needed fixing. Not independently verified by this fork beyond that CI build.
• macOS — builds in CI (macos-latest). No macOS-specific work has happened in this fork at all — genuinely unverified; nobody here has run it.

Touch input (Android)

• An on-screen virtual joystick, bottom-left, floating — it centers on wherever your thumb lands rather than sitting at a fixed spot — mapped to WASD-equivalent movement.
• Free-swipe camera look anywhere else on the screen.
• Every finger is classified once, on touchdown — joystick, UI, or world-look — and keeps that role until it lifts. That structure is what fixed an earlier bug where a tap's release could be silently dropped (the real cause of "taps need spamming" and "a second resting finger fixes it"), rather than patching around it case by case.
• Status: implemented and merged, not yet confirmed on a real device. CI proves the APK compiles, packages, and — as of the last signed build — that release signing works; an actual play session hasn't happened yet.
• Planned next, tracked in #8: face/camera-based target selection without needing Tab, and a more mobile-tailored FrameXML layout with auto-login.

TurtleWoW compatibility

benilla already speaks the stock 1.12.1 protocol, which gets you onto a TurtleWoW realm on its own — this section is the gap-filling on top of that, specific to what TurtleWoW's own client patch changed or added.

• Two extra playable races — Goblin (Horde) and Blood Elf / High Elf (Alliance) — through character creation, the race-select icon art (read from the client's own CharacterCreate.lua icon table when present, the frozen vanilla math otherwise), and the per-race equipment/helm model variants.
• Sound kits TurtleWoW references that the vanilla DBC doesn't ship no longer error-spam — a missing kit id is warned once, then plays as silence, same as a kit with no attached file.
• Everlook's internet-radio towers are recognized — their SoundEntries path is a stream URL, not an MPQ path — and no longer error every 5 seconds. Actually streaming the station isn't implemented yet: tuning in correctly silences the zone music but plays nothing, tracked in #3.
• Camera Lua API extended with CameraZoomIn / CameraZoomOut (used by things like the barbershop's chair camera) and FlipCameraYaw.
• benilla.toc updated to load TurtleWoW's own json.lua codec and the block of TurtleWoW-exclusive FrameXML files its manifest appends, in TurtleWoW's own load order; the two real functionality gaps that block on (StopMusic, CameraZoomOut) are filled by host verbs.
• Options → Graphics no longer errors on a TurtleWoW install — its patch replaces OptionsFrame.lua with its own category/search system, which doesn't define the slider-bounds table the panel reads, so those bounds are now vendored as a fallback.
• Fixed a client-breaking Lua gap: getfenv/setfenv weren't implemented at all, and TurtleWoW's own Globals.lua opens with _G = getfenv(0) — so the whole file, and everything chained after it (wipe, trim, explode, sizeof, print), silently failed to load. That surfaced as unrelated-looking nil-global errors deep inside UIParent.lua, nowhere near the real cause. Both are implemented now.
• Warden is not implemented — no crypto, no module execution, and that isn't planned to change — but the client no longer disconnects over receiving SMSG_WARDEN_DATA, since TurtleWoW appears to send it without enforcing it. This is a "don't treat an unenforced packet as fatal" decision, not Warden support: a server that does enforce it will still silently kick you after about 30 seconds rather than giving a clear error.

Known open gaps, tracked as issues: TransmogUI renders only its background (#2), the Inspect window's Talents tab is empty pending FrameXML work (#7), and some Tauren gear/hair combinations render white under a cause not yet identified (#6).

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, 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:

• An English 1.12.1 client (build 5875) for the game data. benilla only reads it.
• A 1.12.1 server with Warden off. vmangos is what development runs against, and it ships with Warden off; cMaNGOS and the other 1.12.1 cores speak the same protocol.
• Stable Rust and a C compiler, because the client's Lua is built from source: 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.

Windows config lands in C:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\benilla-twow\benilla-config

Android config lands in /sdcard/Android/media/benilla-config

Font Support via the 5 Original Fontnames inside /benilla-config/fonts. (ARIALN.ttf, FRITZQT__.ttf, skurri.ttf, MORPHEUS.ttf, WarSansTT-Bliz-500.ttf)

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.

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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 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.