I'm just curious as to why there is no source code out there. I recently graduated from college and every bit of code I wrote, I kept, and that includes code from members of team projects that I was involved with. I would assume that I am not the only one who does this.
Gratz on the graduation. And I'm not a part of this project, just a well wisher.
And yeah, I kept all my code while I went through college too.
Several problems with your concept though.
I'm presuming that the CoH code is gagillions of lines long considering it's been being developed for 8+ years. Much of which was probably black boxed so the original developers know only the X code and later developers know Y code.
Normally any code you write while working at a company is the sole property of said company and you can get sued if you used it outside of that company.
And the code may be still in use through a different application. NCSoft may or may not know this and wants to err of the safe side. It happens all the time.
When I was working for Sprint, I saw pieces of code used for several different projects and legacy code that was still standing from the 70s and 80s. With that code several people where still developing using it, but there was only one person who really understood it.
I don't know how they are reverse engineering the project (decompiler, deassember, what have you) but we have to realize that some of the code they find may not have been seen/worked on since 02.