thanks for taking the time to read through my wall of text and and on top of that even answering every single question! Really appreciated.
You're welcome!
5)
So rather than playing the lizard and the dwarf at the same time this is only intended to make the start of the game unique for each race (and only for the main character). Would that be possible?
Yes, as long as you don't want to support multiplayer whereby one player picks a lizard and the other a dwarf
Regarding the terminology: I interpreted "a map" as "a level", which is a group of terrains, items, characters, triggers, ... that are loaded together by the game. It is not possible for one player to be in level A and another player in level B. However, as Windemere mentioned, you can have multiple terrain patches in the same map that are completely isolated from each other. So this is only a problem in case your two different maps are gigantic so they would not reasonably fit together in a single level.
Are there many API calls to allow us to interact with objects in the game?
There are 174 Osiris story API calls that have the word "Item" in their name. Several more are applicable to both characters and items. In general, items are quite flexible, and in some ways they can do more than characters (they are not bound to the AI grid for one).
Ah, ok. I guess I will just try out how large of a map my computer can handle.
For reference, the biggest map in the main game (RC_Main) requires 10-12GB of ram in the editor and about half of that in-game. Not sure what its dimensions are, but it's pretty big.
