Sorry for delayed answer, but hopefully you'll still read it. I do agree that on some stage VCMI required plenty of reverse engineering, but even in this case developer who work on clean reimplementation don't really have to understand how original game worked. Of course you need to know how to read original assets formats, but that's all about it.

Also any developer who join project after some initial stage could simply don't care about any limitations original game code had. Like I personally use H3 a lot as reference, but I never ever needed to go into IDA or check assembly listing.

I suppose you can have completely different view on that because you're expert, but for overall person who just starting to do C++ coding it's all looks extremely scary. Even now when I understand it's just require a lot of learning and motivation I simply can't justify do such investment.

Yep, it's definitely true that the programmers on the Ironfist team have all gotten used to browsing through the decompiled listing of the original game's code, and the ones who have been on the project longer have all learned some IDA. (Though it's almost never that any of us needs to look at the assembly.) I'll agree that is a difference. It still seems to be splitting hairs to talk about the difference being knowing how the original game works, vs. knowing how your reimplementation works.

This is the difference that was important to me since when I started to work on VCMI my C++ experience was limited to creating tools in Qt. I also made few attempts to work on number of other projects before that, but never contributed anything back because code wasn't nearly good enough.

I could be biased too, but for many contributors I knew (in open source games, not just VCMI) C++ programming is no more than hobby and if barrier to entry is too high they would likely never start contributing in the first place.

PS: If you ever going to have time and interest in checking VCMI feel free to jump to our slack! We always benefit from advice or two given.

Well, all I can say is: We have some very junior programmers on the team, who are managing pretty well.

(Hmmm, it would totally be cool to "visit" VCMI and see how you guys run things.)

I think it's depend on where you stand. I do have plenty of useful skills and expertise in many areas, but when it comes to C++ development it's likely that I'm nowhere close to "very junior programmer" with proper education. Might be I'll try to get a job in future and will know for sure, but at moment I feel best I could hope for is some QA position.

And a lot of open source contributors are like that especially when it's come to games since there no one to pay for development. There are number of games that have very skilled people on team (VCMI has @alexvins), but usually they started with very basic things and learned along the way. As our project originator who still around, but no longer contributes said: when programmer get good enough he get a job and no longer have time for contributing. :-)

Another thing even is that gap in education quality is huge around the world. We have many people from Poland since H3 is very popular there and sadly even after computer science course their knowledges are much worse than mine and skill of practical development is none. Disclaimer: I don't have any education and situation usually much worse in Russia where I live.