WoW

World of Warcraft (WoW) is a 2004 massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment for Windows and Mac OS X.

Our mission

The Whoa and Thunderbrew projects are based on the mission of recreating a faithful and open-source implementation of the World of Warcraft 3.3.5a.12340 Wrath of the Lich King client.

The game and its libraries have become significantly more complex in the intervening 10+ years. By picking 3.3.5a, it's possible to imagine our implementation will eventually be complete.

Study

Many attempts have been made throughout history to study the internals of this client.

To consolidate and refine our collective understanding into a monolithic, usable reverse-engineering package, Binana, a repository of symbol databases and C headers, was created.

Compiler

For Windows, the client was known to be compiled using the Microsoft Visual C++ Compiler ^{but which version?}

For the Mac OS X port, the XCode version of GCC was used.

Libraries

The WoW client was known to have the following libraries:

• fmod - For in-game audio playback

• lua - Used extensively for Glue and FrameScript. Much of the client runs through this Lua interface.

• libexpat - Used to parse XML, commonly used in GlueXML and FrameXML

Software that supports 3.3.5a

3.3.5a benefits from a significant buy-in from the community of developers, making it the de facto standard version of WoW.

• TrinityCore (3.3.5)
• Noggit3