If you are intrested about planet size/game scale, you should take a look at this project: http://infinity-universe.com/Infinity/index.php All the planets are randon-generated and.. they are HUGE =) There is a tech video in the front page that shows the scale..
Yeah.. the game is in development for years... but the scope is really huge! I don't think they will finish the game without a proper funding. Anyway, they have a full working planetary system that is a bit like what PA wants to do..
To detail a little bit more : - They are working on their engine, who is meant to generate a full Milky Way with its hundreds of billions of stars system, each star system being fully on-scale and realistic, and letting you fly from space to the ground without loading screen. Think SpaceEngine with game physics/scripting and far better ground details. And more overall prettiness. - Their final goal is to make a space MMO with exploration, industry, combat and an evolving storyline. (The first arc, during the open beta, should be about finding the Earth. You don't imagine how easily you loose a homeworld.) - Such MMO wouldn't have walking characters and such, most of its content would be procedurally generated, and so would cost far less than, say, a WoW-clone. But still, we're talking about a whole bunch of money here. - So they will begin with publishing first a downloadable tech demo (planned this December), then an online space shooter (there should be a Kickstarter campaign sometime in early 2013). - They also intend to licence the engine, with probably also a SDK based on (IIRC) the UDK model : free for free games, a % of the benefits for commercial games. But the above point is taking priority right now, so this is probably more for next year. - They would then go for the MMO with the raised funds. If they don't have enough at this point, they may search for investors ; for now those are quite interested, but wait for them to have published something. They published a small prototype (the Infinity Combat Prototype) a bunch of years ago that gives a glimpse on the gameplay (specifically, on the combat gameplay with fighters). It may not work on the most recent hardware, though. It was published when it was still one guy coding the whole engine (seriously, he built most of this alone on his spare time), and it was only to test networking, so keeping it maintained wasn't planned anyway. All in all, I love space shooters, I love astronomy, so I'm very interested in this project. While the space shooter will surely be fun and the MMO is very promising, I can't wait and fiddle with the SDK.
Scope doesn't really matter if there is no content to fill it with. X_X (Except if scale is the whole purpose of the game)
This thing is vapourware, I've been waiting for as long as I can remember for it to show any kinda real progress.
The engine has gone through several rewrites (OpenGL to DX9 to DX11) and direction changes so it can be licensed as a proper engine. Not vapourware, it just takes time when you don't have a team of 10 working on it. (while also having a full-time job)
