Whely's World

Whely's World is a small 3D world that opens in a window inside World of Warcraft. You walk around it with your own character, talk to whoever else is in the room, put furniture down, and leave again -- without logging out, and without anybody needing anything but the add-on.

It runs entirely on the client's own models and the add-on's own physics. There is no server, no account, and no external connection: rooms are carried over the game's own add-on messaging, so a room is you and the friends you invite.

Open it from the add-on compartment beside the minimap, or type /ww.

What is in it

• Walk, run, jump, swim, and fly through a real collision world, with step-up, ramps, ground following, and water. Movement uses retail's own speeds, so it feels like the game it is running inside.
• Be your own character, or anything else -- the character picker searches every creature, mount and battle pet display the client knows.
• Talk in room chat with speech bubbles and nameplates, or use /emote, /say, /roll, /who, and the sit, dance, sleep, and kneel emotes.
• Decorate, by browsing a catalog of housing decor and world props and placing them where you like. The editor works like the game's own housing editor -- move, rotate and scale modes, arrow-key nudging, a snap grid you can turn off, duplicate and remove -- and everything you place is synced to everyone else in the room.
• Play sounds for the whole room from the soundboard.
• Up to eight players per room. Invite over whisper, party, raid, guild, or to anyone nearby running the add-on; the host controls the world and the room.
• Tune it -- camera, field of view, movement speeds, gravity, jump height, and collision are all sliders, and every keybinding follows the ones you already use in WoW.

The five worlds it comes with

Pick one from Worlds in the Escape menu -- each is a large picture of the place; click it to travel there.

Blockcraft -- a Minecraft-style island of blocks, and the world the add-on opens into. Mine, build and craft together, swim the sea, and keep the zombies off at night, or switch to creative for every block to hand and no zombies at all. The host picks survival or creative and a turning day or endless daylight, everything is shared with the room, and Reset World puts the island back as it started.

Lumbridge -- the castle and its courtyard rebuilt from Old School RuneScape, with the church, Bob's shop, the tavern and the bridge nearby, and its own classic RuneScape-style interface.

Founder's Park -- an Elwynn village green. A stone fountain court at the centre, four flower beds, benches you can actually sit on, cobbled walks that connect the whole garden, open lawns under green Elwynn trees, and deer wandering the woodland at the edges. Orchard Keeper Rowan by the fountain has a quest, and a training dummy stands beside the east path.

Chess Board -- a full-size, playable chess board on the sand of a colosseum, played by WoW's own pieces: humans against orcs, each one a 32-yard board's worth of them, standing on squares four yards across. A ten-yard podium looks over it, a seating bank rises to an arcade fifty yards up, and a hundred and fifty spectators fill the terraces. The rules are complete -- castling, en passant, promotion, draws -- and there is an opponent built in, so a player alone in the room still has a game. Two players in the same room play each other.

Elwynn Crossroads -- a hamlet built from Elwynn Forest's own models: an inn and market, the smithy, a farmstead with its windmill, a logging camp and an old gold mine, with guards on the roads.

On a modest PC, choose Performance under Options > Visual Quality.