HIVE

This is physically possible to do if I target a specific version of WoW, but if I try to orient towards newer versions then Activision would simply do an update to make my program no longer run on the latest version, like how they updated to make Warsmash no longer compatible with War3 classic when I got Warsmash + 1.32.10 working. They keep their formats always rolling, to an almost hostile degree.

Also, just in general, when I look inside an old WoW MPQ the contents there are beautiful. When we look inside the new WoW CASC with the hashes instead of file names, it's just a sick soup of wasted time. Technologists fighting each other while they try to stop us from appreciating their work. I mean, society is doing well enough at ceasing to appreciate WoW on its own, but when they encourage it, it gets even worse.

The old WoW installs are a thing of beauty. I found that with Patch 0.5.3, since it was still using MDX format from warcraft 3, I was able to load the MPQ in Retera Model Studio as the linked game install and browse the models, so long as I upgraded the blp iio plugin from DrSuperGood to support BLP2 from WoW:

So, not only is this possible, but I already created it to go along with my WoW-style warsmash map projects that I publish videos of on YouTube. But the modified Warsmash client that loads WoW LUA+XML addons and converts them to Wc3 FDF on the fly and tries to run them along with a third person camera, and split animations (legs vs arms) on the same MDX model, and those other things, if I recall was never uploaded to my GitHub. When I make fun of WoW, I really am probably making fun of it, so publishing the technology for other people is not really something I'm going out of my way to do. It's only on Warcraft 3 that I want to open source it, because I think liberated Warcraft 3 is something that would benefit society more than liberated WoW which is more like fighting activision for their cake which I don't want to fight them for because they have more money than me, and always will, unto infinity.

In my case, however, it's not really a "Retera Model Studio that exports WoW" creation, but rather an attempt to parse WoW models directly. When I play Warsmash with 0.5.3 or 0.5.2 or whatever it is, I load their assets directly. That way I don't even have to reformat them. Bothering to reformat them to Frozen Throne is a silly Reforged-minded thing to do. Instead, when I am the code king, I would just edit Reforged to be able to use those assets directly. But since I'm not the code king of Reforged, and only the code king of Warsmash, I get to decide this experience that I get to have and I get to have it, but no one else does. Because they probably didn't want it, like how Warsmash has no users. I can't decide for other people what kind of box they put their own mind inside of.

I was honestly thinking about making Warsmash load the clothes and such on the characters like you're thinking. I wrote some code to parse their databases and turn them to SLK (or to the Warsmash equivalent storage) on the fly, and it seemed to work fine for the UI sounds so that the buttons in the WoW Lua+XML ui were working and playing their sounds when it called the lua functions to play sounds and such. I would imagine, one could parse the DBs for the clothes and items the same way. But on my simulation, I would probably connect the Object Editor items with the clothes or whatever, so that I could WoW items in world editor and then equip them ingame as a way to play with these. I didn't get that far, but when I do, it would still be overkill if you're just hoping to use that technology understanding and rip out of it an MDX export that can load in Reforged or Frozen Throne. Should be totally possible, though. Warsmash and Twilac RMS use the same MDL/MDX code, so the game literally has a function in the code for writing out MDX files to disk. And BLP conversion is already solved if we use the version of Retera Model Studio that can load and preview BLP2, and can save BLP1.

Anyway, I am not your golden ticket to solving these problems. I am a downstream user of the people who are publishing the technology understanding of how to load WoW characters and items and models and all these things. If you want that information, you can get it from their websites.