Wow. He could probably make some good money off this as is (if that was his goal), but I imagine if he added VR support, he's probably get money from everyone that bought a headset.<p>Projects like this always ended up being more fun for me to play that the vast majority of released polished games. Part of that is probably seeing updates happen that actually change the game. There's something visceral about that feed of updates, and feeling like you're there as something is being made. You can do a lot to engage a user base that way.
For reference: <a href="http://pegwars.blogspot.com/2010/03/what-is-pegwars.html" rel="nofollow">http://pegwars.blogspot.com/2010/03/what-is-pegwars.html</a><p>Neat to see his project grow and evolve as he did for good bit of his life.
Reminds me of Infinity by Ysaneya on GameDev.net -- he started building a space game engine back in 2004, and would regularly post updates over the years. Eventually it almost-launched as an MMO but apparently there was some kind of pivot recently.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_(upcoming_video_game)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_(upcoming_video_game)</a>
I'd be interested to know if the author followed the "alt.fan.elite" newsgroup back in the 1996-1997 timeframe. There were some discussions on the group at that time re: multiplayer online Elite-type games. (Specifically, I ended having a number of emails w/ a guy named Randall near Melbourne talking about game dynamics, etc, back in late 1996. I'm sure it isn't the same guy, but it brought back fun memories and caused me to dig out some old backups for a quick read today!)
Really cool would be to have processes on planets (and stars) which would modify them. To be able to modify them at will and have modification persistent.<p>Probably quite doable.