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Controller buttons bind through the same table as keys: every command on the controls page shows its key and its button, and either is rebound by pressing a key or a button. The options gain a Controller page: button layout (Default, Tactical, Lefty, Bumper Jumper, Bumper Jumper Tactical), stick layout, look and aim-down-sight sensitivity, invert, response curve, aim assist, vibration and deadzones, all kept in settings.cfg. The look stick turns at rates that build up to full deflection, slower down the sight and scaled by the zoom. Aim assist works over visible enemies within each weapon's own aim assist ranges, read from the weapon data: slowdown and lock-on, and on Full a pull onto a target when the sight comes up. It applies only while aiming with the controller. Menus take the D-pad or left stick, A and B, and Start opens them. Focus moves by screen position rather than by menu file order, which jumped around the options pages for arrow keys too; left and right on a button cross columns. The Advanced Video page no longer draws the FOV slider over Bloom. The controller in use is the last one pressed or moved, so a virtual joystick or an idle second pad stays out of the way; rumble follows it and the vibration setting. Use/reload reloads when nothing usable is in reach. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
IW4L
IW4L is a Call of Duty runtime written from scratch in Rust, on bevy and wgpu. Point it at a copy of MW2 you already own and it loads that install's data into its own engine.
The on-disk layouts came out of reverse engineering the original binaries and reading public technical references.
This whole project is written by an LLM.
Status
No releases yet: you build it from this tree. Nothing here is stable either — the API, the config format, caches and the wire protocol all change between commits, so everyone in a session needs to be on the same one. Expect bugs and desyncs.
The network side is for arranged playtests among people who already agreed to play; it has never been vetted for lobbies full of strangers. IW4L sends nothing home, and diagnostic files sit on your disk until you attach them to a report.
Architecture
| assets | MW2 zones read natively; MW3 and Black Ops land in the same asset_iw4 IR. |
| shaders | Retail D3D9 SM3 tokens translated to WGSL, so no DirectX at runtime. |
| rendering | One sorted drawsurf list; only the tess emitters fork per surface type. |
| physics | Fixed 17 ms step on its own accumulator. Framerate changes nothing about how a body falls. |
| simulation | One TickInput → sim::step → Snapshot funnel for server, prediction and replay. |
| network | Custom p2p wire over UDP: deltas, reliability, reconciliation. A QUIC master only introduces peers. |
| platforms | Linux, macOS (Metal) and a portable Windows build. |
Retail protocols, the original ABI and patched executables are out of scope. IW4L clients talk to IW4L clients.
Game data
IW4L_GAMES points at the folder holding your game trees. No assets ship in
this repository or in any release, and IW4L is unaffiliated with the rights
holders of the original games.
Those trees are read only. IW4L never patches them, swaps files in them or
writes anything back; caches, settings, demos and logs land in
iw4l-artifacts/ next to the IW4L binary.
Build and run
System packages first: docs/BUILD.md (Fedora / Debian /
Arch — compiler, ALSA, udev, X11/Wayland headers; macOS — Xcode command line
tools).
cp .env.example .env # IW4L_GAMES — folder containing the game trees
make map mp_boneyard # run a map
make map mp_boneyard CMDS='spawn 0; wait 2s; quit'
make help # every recipe
Live runs use [profile.play], a development build with optimizations turned
on. PROFILE=release builds the real release binary.
docs/WINDOWS.md covers Windows.
Documentation
Implementation notes live under docs/, one short file per area. Start at
docs/INDEX.md.
| file | about |
|---|---|
docs/BUILD.md |
system packages per distro, macOS, Windows cross prerequisites |
docs/RUN.md |
running the game, console scripts, commands and traps |
docs/PERF.md |
Perfetto tracing and performance analysis |
docs/RENDER.md |
rendering pipeline |
docs/MAP-LOAD.md |
map loading and asset installation |
docs/ENTITIES.md |
simulation data flow and entity taxonomy |
docs/SIM-STEP.md |
simulation step architecture |
docs/ANIM.md |
animation system |
docs/WINDOWS.md |
portable Windows build |
docs/DEPLOY.md |
release, publishing and deployment |
docs/MASTER.md |
running your own master server |
Contributing and support
A personal, experimental project. Bug reports are welcome and get no promised
fix date. CONTRIBUTING.md says what a useful report
contains and how changes get reviewed; security reports go to
SECURITY.md.
Acknowledgements
IW4L ships none of the code below. It was read against all of it.
- OpenAssetTools and its iw4x-x64 fork — modding tools whose asset-structure headers document the on-disk layouts IW4L reads.
- IW4x — a custom client for MW2 (2009), a cross-reference for asset and protocol behaviour.
- KisakCOD — an open-source CoD4 reimplementation, a cross-reference for engine structure one generation over in the same family.
- Ghidra — the framework the original binaries were read with.
License
IW4L is licensed under the Apache License 2.0, and
NOTICE holds the copyright notices, the licences of the projects
above and the bundled fonts. That licence covers IW4L's own source code. Call
of Duty, Modern Warfare, Black Ops and the related assets, trademarks and
intellectual property belong to their respective owners.