Shauren

visual studio 2019 did not exist back when 7.3.5 was current, its not compatible

No, it was broken back then too

You are supposed to use libmysql.dll from the installation of mysql that cmake found and used to compile I'm using mysql 8 and openssl 1.1.0 just fine

item, item_sparse, item_modified_appearance and hotfix_data tables in hotfix database

No, you cannot. Master branch is on latest 8.3.0 version

Just download the client from battle.net app, even a trial (or "starter" as they call it now) is enough

This table exists only to send sniffed hotfixes for db2 files that are not loaded by TC. You should never try to manually insert data into it. If you really must know - blob is simply the entire db2 row written as binary

No, Arctium Launcher is the only way.

No, I don't really care about mac clients, the current 8.2.5.32750 build being allowed for mac clients on TC is actually an exception, not a norm, it is the first one since 7.3.5

If you don't have a launcher then no, you need to use windows client

It sounds like you connect both worldservers into the same character database, you need to separate them and share only auth (and world if you dont want to customize anything for only one realm)

You need to use folder name (case sensitive) and version from .toc, timestamp is for cache, just set it to current time

Install MySQL 5.7, thats all you must do

You don't need the client at all after extraction (but you will need it again if there are fixes/changes done to extractors, to extract again), you can also delete Buildings

Ignore startup errors Allied races are not implemented