I love how people who dont know about 3d CG can dismiss demos because it looks like a previous game or has some feature that was sort of implemented before. The demo/trailer may not have "ohh'ed and awe'd" you but it doesn't mean that there isn't something significant going on under the engine.
For those who didn't read the demo specs, the planet descent footage was done on an old athlon 3500 and ati x800(i'm assuming real time or it would be meaningless). There are no levels to load because it is a procedurally generated terrain. The surface of the planet is a basic sphere which is subdivided(or tessellated for you johnny come latelys) and a displacement map is applied to create the mountains. That map is generated by fractal noise algorithms that can be expressed as a few number settings on the noise generator, eliminating the need for a colossal model mesh or even a color map as the fractal generator can do color effects. The memory savings can be significant enough to allow you to devote resources to other things like the ships.
this level of procedural modeling was available 8+ years ago, but there was a cpu hit taken as it takes a fair bit of computing power to make the noise data and convert it into the final render. Given the power of available now with duals and quads(or even gpu compute), something like this could be done viably.
the developer of the engine seems to be pushing ahead, not a whole lot of updates on their site since 2008, but there are completion percentages on the assets.
Based on a quick browse of their site, I have to say I'm not optimistic about their prospects. the art style aspires to be like the stuff from conceptships.org, but they are relying on some fan submissions to round out the ship lineup. It makes for a motley assortment of art/design styles. Releasing a space mmo with STO out now(not to mention EVE), seems questionable.
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