First up, I had to find an engine / game that could be torn apart and modded to the utmost. Something really popular already and something that had a solid community. I'm never really sick of RPG's, but I found that there was never quite enough people willing to join fantasy medieval related severs. So I ended up choosing a classic.
GTA 4!
I've spent about a week now learning code, modding the shit out of the game and attempting to set up a private dedicated server. So far so good.
The hardest part was trying to decide what kind of GTA world to run, something that would catch everyone's eye and be fun for years to come. I personally hate it when I spend years making something and then it gets boring and nobody plays anymore
IE NWN 1. Never Winter Nights had it all from a world builders standpoint.... and the only limit was bandwidth and max players.... or hell, I'd still be running it
So onto GTA 4. It's cheep or free if you are willing to search for it, so nobody here has that excuse. The mods are all free, including mine and I will be making an installer to just double click and run.... easy as pie
Onto the world idea; I tried super heroes, which I thought would be cool and managed to find a few really cool mods that people made and that worked well, however it grew difficult to code fast and game crashing was a constant. So dump that idea.... moved on.
Soon found that people were creating tons of textures and ran into a fellow making cool vids about "The walking Dead" with GTA 4 (one of my person fav shows ever). So that seemed very interesting and I started searching and compiling and I'm currently sitting at the point of;
Fully running (non crashing) mostly persistent world, with a never ending zombie apocalypse running.
Added functionality to spawn in a few helping hands (Daryl and Meryl from the show). These two fellows act as companions, while others can join your group randomly as you come across survivors.
The persistent parts of the game are all thanks to some ingenious fellow out there that managed to create food/water mods/ inventory packs, car trunks that hold weapons, weight limits, realistic damage to cars and fuel consumption. Makes it so you can't just hide in a corner and avoid zombies forever. You will get hungry or injured and you will have to move on and find more goodies to survive.
The key to this entire en-devour is to get it running 24/7 on a dedicated server with private access to those invited (thus avoiding non role-playing idiots from logging in). So far, no luck, dedicated servers either run fine with no city life or simply don't run with mods
but I'll find away around that... always do! 
If anyone is interesting in beta-testing this game/world with me, post here and I'll get your email and set you up when the time comes to join me and the others for the first run.
An average computer is required, with at least a decent graphics card. (I'm running a version on my shitty 2.4 GHz laptop, with 4 gig ram and it's ok, but not great.)
anyway, back to work
