TL;DR: It depends. That's one helluva loaded question.
I get asked from time to time by people who want to help out with Paragon Chat. And while that's great and I really appreciate it; it's an extremely complex project that demands in-depth knowledge of how the internals of a rather unique design work, plus the low-level programming skills to make use of it. People who haven't been working on it from the start (and in many cases for years before shutdown even) have a hard time adapting and the track record isn't good. I end up spending more time answering questions than getting useful work done. That's doubly bad if they then lose interest or otherwise disappear.
What's really needed are self-starters who can play catch-up on their own, learn the concepts and specifics that took years to decipher, and - when they're ready - be able to integrate those into the whole without a lot of guidance.
I realize that part of that is a chicken and the egg program. There really aren't any community resources detailing how any of this stuff works. Everyone has their own toolset and accumulated knowledge, and there's no clear picture anywhere of how it all fits together except in a few people's heads. Those people can't afford to drop everything for the months or longer it would take to organize it all. Some of the RE stuff is borderline and while it's
probably defensible, a number of developers involved with the project are skittish about being targeted by nuisance lawsuits. I don't have an easy way to fix that.
So, just throwing ideas out here, one way a project manager or engineer type who doesn't have any COH-specific experience yet could contribute is by organizing a community project to gather and document all these disparate sources. I'm talking things like file formats and general "this is how the engine works" knowledge, organized in some way. Maybe produce a standard toolset for manipulating game data. That might help other people who want to contribute get up to speed without being a drain on resources.
Make no mistake, that's a huge project. If somebody puts one together I am certainly willing to contribute to it where I can, but it's not something I have the free time to run, or provide easy answers to everything.
While I'm here, I'll just go ahead and point out that there
are two open source emulator projects out there that were asking for people to contribute.
One of them got as far DB login and a partially working mapserver with an old client, but I haven't heard anything from it in a while.
The other seems to have committed some authentication code and then never done anything else.
