Pioneer Alternatives

Pioneer

Pioneer is a space adventure game set in the Milky Way galaxy at the turn of the 31st century. The game is open-ended, and you are free to explore the millions of star systems in the game. You can land on planets, slingshot past gas giants, and burn yourself to a crisp flying between binary star systems.

Planets:
1. Real sized (vast) planets (detail to smaller than 1 m)
2. Procedurally generated - huge number of terrains, mountains, volcanos, plains craters,rivers, seas, ice caps, impact craters, atmospheres with different gasses, rings etc. etc.
3. Seamless planetary flight - no loading, can fly next to ground,high in the air, low orbit, space during the same fight etc.

Solar systems:
1. Planets, binary/ternary suns, moons, gas giants, black holes etc..
2. All objects are completely dynamic: orbit in real time, spin on their axis, have gravity etc. (Full day night cycles , eclipses etc.)
3. Real sized galaxy with billions of solar systems etc.

Gameplay:
Open ended: explore, fight, trade,traffic, spy, be a criminal, join factions/struggles for independence etc.

Structures:
Cities, space stations, starports, military bases etc. on planets/moons and in space.

Development state (April 2011):
1. Alpha 9 (pre-alpha really as they don't use a roadmap based version system) released, nightly builds as well. Source was released online recently, after a few years dev offline.
2. Procedural planets are very advanced, devs focused on make or break parts first (other sections like interface is less advanced).

See forum for info on where to get nightly builds/source code/feature requests etc.

Fan videos (very early version, look on site for newer ones - the game is in the open ended/procedural spirit of Frontier elite rather than a clone as suggested by the videos): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aVf-8qVdsg & http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4W--xjO2AWs