I've had this idea for awhile, but I keep coming back to it. I'm thinking about making a custom dedicated server for Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy that could hold more players concurrently.
I would also like to mod JA itself to make it a little more RPG like. I feel that I would almost have to do that in order to slow down the bandwidth useage so that I could fit more people on the server. I'm thinking that It would be a zoned persistant world. The server would actually be a network of server instances that would be running a specific map as a zone with all the instances accessing the same SQL database for character data. With a decent server and some moderate bandwidth, I'm hoping to clear about 500 players.
My question is just how much custom content do you think I'm going to have to make to get this game to work. I don't figure the game world has to be that big since I'm trying to hold about 500 to 1000 players at a time. The big question is character models, Items, Mobs, etc....
No, I do not want to make a poor man's version of pre-CU SWG. I'm thinking that the game would be more like a graphical DikuMUD than the original SWG.