I recieved a reply from the lead Dev at Earth and Beyond and a basic guide on what they did:
The answer to your question is that we had some data packets which were captured while the game was live, not a lot but several megabytes worth. We spent about a year cracking the encryption on those, this required an effort similar to folding@home / seti@home and other such initiatives of computers to try to crack that. This part sort of occurred separately amongst a lot of die hard fans from ebportal as well as us.
Once that was complete, we had two projects that got started, one based in Java and one in C++ known as 'Net-7' which has been what survived until today. Both made some major advances in the beginning making a single player version of the game, and eventually we were able to move up to a multiplayer version based on those packets and building the necessary structure for the server to support them.
That being said, I'm not going to lie to you, an emulator is a lot of hard work, especially for an MMOG of any kind. You're going to need a team of dedicated programmers who are into reviving your game and are willing to do the work for nothing. I think we did some math not long ago, we've spent 8 years on this, if I took the average salary people would make in the industry and applied it to the amount of time we've spent working, this project would rate about $26MM in total cost, fortunately everyone does it out of love and we don't have to pay those costs.
LUA is a scripting language for events, as to talk technical and give you realistic ideas, I would have had to know a little more about what made CoH tick, and unfortunately, having not played it, I don't.
I would say this though, I often see the phrase "I am not a programmer, but.." when getting new development offers or questions similar to your own in some way. No one is a programmer when they start, if you really love the game, learning a programming language is a small price to pay to make it come back.
I hope that helps your endeavor, but I would say the number of people you need depends on the timeframe you want to get it running and the assets you have going in your favor, such as the data packets we had.
Kyp
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Content Director
Net-7 Entertainment - Board Member