Okay, since I'm programming a game for a couple of months now, I started wondering. Would you (maybe CA) be able to make an exact copy of SV in RPG-Maker? No, I'm not making my game in RPG-M, no, it is not a SV clone. But the more I look at it (and the more I'm into XNA / MonoGame), I question myself, if this game could have been done in the maker. If not, why you think so? What do u think wouldn't be doable with the utilities RGP-M provides?
In order to make something like this in RPGM you'd need so many custom scripts you might as well just make an engine from scratch. And the end result would be super-laggy too, because RPGM is terrible at resource management.
A lot of SDV's stuff would not be possible in RPGM, I'd think. There is a Harvest Moon Clone for RPGM already that's on Steam, but it's not SDV, it's a bit different.
Yes, it's possible, but as mentioned already, it's very ineffective. All RPG Makers that I used had problems with managing custom scripts, sometimes things were choppy, many sprites and animations slightly displaced and on my first pc (that could handle Neverwinter Nights on low, old times) one game made in RPG Maker 2000 was so laggy it was unplayable (all because of tons of scripts, it was a sim/tycoon game). So have a comparison, a famously laggy and badly written game compared to RPG Maker 2000 and RPG Maker is the one less efficient. New versions are not that much better in this regard.
I thought of this as soon as the game was released. People have created games like Final Fantasy 7,8,9 with six way movement and static backgrounds to make a game which mimics the original. A harvest Moon/social game would be fun to make and easy within RPG Maker Software, but you would need existing scripts to implement what you needed or learn the language made just for the software instead of c++ which can be used in anything.
There are a few tutorials for HM-based clones on RPGMaker forums, but I doubt given the complexity of all the systems found in SDV, they'd be able to replicate it. It's probably better to use a different engine. The HM clone mentioned, by the way, is World's Dawn, which I also have, and I think while it's a decent game, it shows the limitations that the engine has, although the creator has said they'd add more content. But so far - for example, for farming, unlike SDV, you're limited to 40 squares + some more in later game, but you can't farm anywhere you want, and there are only certain set points for foraging, etc.
