OK first, Tow Dragon pointed me to bugs.vcmi.eu/view.php?id=98 . In the end it was just about adding a line, but it walked me through a large part of the project so I got a general idea of how it works.
I am attaching the diff here as well and I am available for more bugs fixing. If anyone could assign me some I will get busy with them asap.
Second I could not get logging from lib or server projects and neither VCMI_Client_log.txt nor VCMI_Server_log.txt work on MacOS X. (possibly Linux ? i tested that on Visual Studio and windows and there the logs files showed up).
I realize I said I will get to work asap but it is clear now I was overly enthusiastic about the whole thing :).
I had to take care of some of my stuff first and afterwards I started to read thoroughly “Accelerated C++” in order to get a grasp of the C++ language.
Once I finish this book, probably at the end of the week, I will get back to these bugs and the status window.