Sweet!

Indeed I can haz:

instead of:

z what sized image do you use as a base for your icon. I have a nicer looking head I would like to give you.

At present, can these functions be called any earlier in the loading process than LuaRules?

the C++ functions called by these Lua functions could be called much earlier, but that would need engine patching (for each game), or support for checking availability of hard-coded file-names for the image (and maybe text, though that makes less sense) and loading them from the file-system directly.
but i do not see this as a big problem. as long as the game is not yet loaded, it even makes sense to see only the spring logo and text there, as that is what it is (totally untouched by the game yet). i can also see the desire to have spring logo and text totally gone of course.

hmmm a logo.png as a default then makes sense, I'd always thought about setting up Spring so it opened its window/went fullscreen a lot sooner and showed a spring logo but never gotten around to it...

Cute! I say take the Spring logo out of it.