[Goober5000]

JAD has better branding than DEM.

[NGTM-1R]

Branching might be hard, RPG elements might be semi-hard, but I think it depends on which ones.

Aerotech just hit as an alpha, and a salvage mechanic would be painful, but probably doable.

[Phantom Hoover]

Wait, I thought branching in FSO is technically very easy; just a conditional switch for mission progression.

[General Battuta]

Wait, I thought branching in FSO is technically very easy; just a conditional switch for mission progression.

Branching is easy. Looping back to hub worlds/places visited earlier is also 'easy', though very hackish.

[Black Wolf]

I prototyped a system for tracking several dozen persistent characters and their ships across the course of a campaign. (Remember, I am not trying to equate this to some bizarre FSGTA open world!) Data storage, again, wasn't the bottleneck. It was content generation.

For the record, I was talking about a GTA style sandbox came in space, like freelancer. I don't doubt that FRED can store data for a number of characters across a campaign. But that's still not enough to handle the kind of game that me, mjn and (I think) the OP are talking about. If you want to restrict it to Warcraft 3 style RPG elements within FSs traditional framework, as the thread seems to bave drifted towards, then that's much more achievable, though you're right that without a procedural generation system, then the content creation hurdle would also be immense (which was one of the points I already made in my first post).

[General Battuta]

Yep, I agree. Although I think it is worth pointing out that most sandbox style games actually have very little persistence - the systems that populate and govern the play areas are homeostatic, and they tend to erase the results of player action over time.

[karajorma]

I can see something like Freelancer working quite well in the FS2_Open engine. You'd have tightly scripted mission for the main plot and then just build up some systems for everything else. When it comes down to it, the non-mission sandbox part of freelancer consists simply of changing the values of a handful of variables (money, weapons installed / available, which factions hate me).

[NGTM-1R]

Wait, I thought branching in FSO is technically very easy; just a conditional switch for mission progression.

Branching is easy to create in a literal sense.

However, note that branching campaigns are extremely rare, because both from a conceptual and a sheer level of work standpoint, they are not easy in any way, shape, or form. Not all obstacles are technical.

[qwadtep]

I've thrown around the idea of a mercenary campaign where you're actually paid for your work and use it to buy new ships and weapons, but have never gotten around to doing it.

Yep, I agree. Although I think it is worth pointing out that most sandbox style games actually have very little persistence - the systems that populate and govern the play areas are homeostatic, and they tend to erase the results of player action over time.

Because if you don't prune noncritical data from time to time you end up with a bigger world/savefile than the game itself. I've heard of Minecraft servers running into the hundreds of gigs. And of course, throwing around that much data is great for introducing errors.