There simply isnt really an engine for indie MMO developers... indie and MMO dont work that well. The only MMO engine I ever heard about that is not an in house specific propriety one is the Hero engine, which was used with SW:ToR ( as a development aid, allegedly the ToR devs moved onto thier own engine later ).

You can still just code some basic level, putting the whole MMO aspect aside and experiment with the features you want to add while you wait for an engine / research an engine.

This was done using mostly algorithms to generate geometry and texture.
If you are a oneman-army of developers, looking into procedural generation will probably be the way to go due to massive cut of development time.
You do however have to be a bit of a genious

Best of luck though

I'm not really a 1 man army.But I'm glad for all the feedback for all your concerns.All the "what if that goes wrong!?" subject intrigues me.It helps perfecting things.So keep up it going.



For now I found 1 engine(Outerra) .. and I'm observing closely the progress. It might be promising!

This is a very interesting topic. I am currently discovering the same delima; that sperical terrain generators are not available. The fact is, there really isn't a spherical coordinate system that will allow fractal (or plasma) height mapping. I am currently attempting a new approach to this and would "love" some feedback. Basically there are several (80 that I have found) mathematical polyhedrons.
Concept 1:
Each FACE of the polyhedron would then be a 2D plane which could be 'mapped' using a standard terrain generator. This would get us close but the result would still not be a sphere (or ellipsoid). Also, we would be applying two separate coordinate systems, one for the polyhedron and the other for its FACE.
Concept 2:
This is similar to Concept 1 with the exception of the use of a standard terrain mapper. Basically, (and I have still not resolved all of the math) the polyhedron-function would continue to attempt to create a polyhedron of more and more FACES. Similar to how the recursive plasma function works, a recursive function would resolve down to 1R resolution.
Like I have stated, I have found 80 mathematical polyhedrons but I am not certain that my second concept (above) will enable the creation of a recursive polyhedron function of n-FACES....

Any Ideas?