Unfortunatly, torque's terrain system is basically a height map, as in it can only go up and down and would take significant changes.
I'm aware of that. Wurm actually works the same way. I doubted that the terrain would be able to be changed in real time online in Torque though. I'm sure that adding in the feature would be possible, but the effort involved may not be worth it.
item count is unlimited (seeing as how I had to code my own inventory system he he) and theres no dts limit either, but obviously too much will take resources.
The cave system would be functionally different from digging in the terrain, however. The openings to the caves would already exist, but the players would actually have to dig the mines out themself. They don't actually start the mine by digging a hole in the ground, the hole is already there, they start minging into the rock instead. As long as mining out a block takes long enough, and cave ins become an issue dependent on time, or server load, or however you want to code it, the mining system should be funtional. Players should have to work together to mine deep caverns, and the threat of a cave in should always be present. Of course, testing could be done to determine how much the server could handle.
Once I can spare enough income I will upgrade to torque advance which has huge terrain, similiar to what world of warcraft has, and will be able to make huge maps.
Awesome. I'm curious at the prospect of actual forests and the like.
I am planning on having a house building system and eventually towns (I will have an auto update feature so people can get updates anytime)
Also awesome. I really like the idea of a persistant world, and being able to build your own towns definitely caters to that idea. It's also one of the reasons why I was hoping that the players would be able to change the terrain during the game, so that they could flatten out a spot on the side of a mountain to build a house or something.