Alright. I made a smidge of progress here. I finally managed to change out the blizzard logo at the center bottom of the login screen for something of my own.

But doing it this way is going to take forever. I made a Patch-B.mpq for my own stuff, and so far, everything in there was coming out the way it should. Except for the WoW/Interface/GLUES/MainMenu/Glues-BlizzardLogo.blp.

If I put it straight into the directory structure of my WoW game, on the hard drive, no mpq or patch, then it works fine. But if I try to implement the logo change via my Patch-B.MPQ, it never takes and I get the standard Blizzard Logo. Anyone have any clue what is up with that? Design flaw? Design intention and there is nothing I can do about it except keep playing with the LUA codes untiL I get it or leave it in the directory structure outside of a patch?

UPDATE: Got some light learning done so far today. You can change the Cataclysm login screen via the filestructure on the hard drive, not in patches. Unless someone can send me a hacked 32-bit 4.3.4 wow.exe for win...? (hint hint)

I finally found the dragon in the interface directory in the mpq file. It's a .m2 file. Hrm. And if I delete anything from locale-enGB.MPQ wow crashes. I'm almost tempted to go back to WoTLK just so I can do what I need to do. But I like the idea of DX11 support in Cataclysm. Slighty difficult call for me. Functionality or prettiness.

My apologies for actually conveying my frustrations last night. It was late and I was totally stumped on the login screen thing and had been at it a lot longer than I should have been.

As for the link to the tutorial, Mirai, thank you. I will give it a try today.

Perhaps I can finally make some headway.

Thanks, Swamp. And I meant trinity, not arc. It was late when I wrote about that for me.

And I was speaking with Antz earlier about the versioning subroutines in MaNGOS and he confirmed what I thought. The versioning subroutines are bunk. We have this little text file in the dbc directory on the server:

<componentinfo format="1">
    <component name="wow-engb" version="15595" />
</componentinfo>

And that is how they tell what version to accept. And since it is set for 15595 and I am using 00001, that means that I did in fact miss something while hacking my wow.exe.

*extreme pouty face with tears of frustration*

Well, since I use MaNGOS Three right now, it would suffice to say that it could very well be an issue with the core. We can't even compile MaNGOS with VS 2013 yet. Some error that I have yet to start working to figure out.

Either way, again, thanks for the information. Now, I need to figure out how to implement the update code on the MaNGOS core and get that up and running for everyone. And myself.

I'll check the authsocket files in the source for realmd and see if I can figure anything out there as well.

Thanks again for all your help.

PS: Two things: 1) how did my rank go up so fast and 2) I'm including a screeny of my custom version for posterity sake.

[attachment=0:37tc9xp7]WoWScrnShot_122813_205625.jpg[/attachment:37tc9xp7]

Thank you swampdog, and yes, I did edit the build number and the version multiple times, until it said it couldn't find any more references. This is very odd and very frustrating.

Thank you so very much, guys. I am also working on trying to figure out how to mod the login screen. I'm not entirely positive how I want it to look when I get done with it, but definitely different from the standard 4.3.4 screen.

Would anyone know how to tap the news feed on the login screen? I know how to do it from the servers file in the windows system directories, but not from ingame.

I also didn't think of using a hex editor for my dilemma. I was using Resource Hacker for Windows.