I would have attached a video link - but I've posted it as a special "Backers Only" update on the Kickstarter pitch as a thank you for pledging. I also tried embedding images into this Journal - but the gallery/album thing kept breaking, so I'm afraid you'll have to see the (hopefully attached!) album.
This isn't the small scale "halo" you will be familiar with from the game of the same name, but the theorised astronomical scale behemoth that was first(I think?) proposed by the great sci-fi writer Larry Niven in his 1970 book, Ringworld. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld
Putting one of these beasts into a space-game is a recipe for disaster, surely?
The one in the picture has approximately 184,000 times the surface area of Planet Earth - how are we going to texture that? And Ep2 has landing...where will the terrain come from?
Well, we think we've got that sorted already, in my head at least! But I'm always planning for the worst, so come what may Dominion will have Ringworlds - but the player may have to extend some belief-suspension to benefit from them ;) Some cunningly contrived plot-conceits (again, already prepared!) will ease the process if needed. For now, I've just tiled a planet surface - which is very noticable when zooming along the Ringworld surface under g-drive!
At the moment, you can fly to any point around the Ringworld - it's not a preset scene just for show, it physically exists and is to scale. The "angular" appearance is entirely due to pespective and the FOV - this really is what it would look like in reality from this point of view - something I wanted to check purely out or curiousity. Granted it's suffering from some terrible floating point precision jitter when you get real close - but believe it or not, I've got that in hand and it will be easily dealt with. I want to avoid the use of doubles as Dominion will be x-platform, with mobiles in mind - until I can affirm double performance across these platforms, I'll avoid using them. Besides, so far my approach to constructing the scene (which I chose deliberately to avoid needing doubles) is working just fine.
As my (deliberately) corny catch-phrase goes... Watch this Space!
Essentially, you're investing development time to increase player enjoyment. Being in charge of a project, one must constantly consider the return on investment for time spent by the team. As the world size increases, the return on investment quickly decreases. From the player's perspective, how much are they getting from the larger world? At some point, the answer eventually reaches zero and the justification for the larger world (time vs. return) dwindles long before that. I'm pretty skeptical of to-scale planetary surfaces in games (we're still a long way from pulling it off AND making it interesting to players) and 184,000 times the surface area of the Earth is just not happening for under a half-million dollars.
This would be a fantastic project to attempt on your own but it's a risky game to play with other people's money. I'd suggest building a small-scale planet surface with content, collision detection, etc. to get an idea of how difficult it can be to have all the components of a game working together effectively at that scale.