I am hopeful, though, I can get it out this week. To be honest, I'm a little embarrassed when I read back over this thread, my style is kind of frantic at times... I get sidetracked easily... and I'm a perfectionist. The good news is that I have already released a planet, so I know I can do it. It just has to be better than the last.
I have redesigned almost all of the terrain code now, and have 100% coverage (until I decided on the look of the borders, it kind of faded off into 'the Matrix' near the edges). I may fine tune a few POI areas, add a new shader or two still.
I have six caves or caverns now, including Echo Base - and this mysterious guy...
http://i.imgur.com/tNrcQAg.jpg
Echo Base is 50% populated, three of the caves are fully populated, two of them are being worked on.
I wanted to make the planet consistent with what ESB and the NGE laid out... so I took out the volcano for good and added in that new cavern... which certainly expands upon the ideas from the steam room in Echo Base.
There is a new mountain complex in the north with four ice caves, full of Wampas, and each will have one of the giant Wampa bosses at the bottom.
I have a new sky, new weather/environments, I've redesigned my frozen lake concept... I am pretty proud of the 'comeback' work I've done in the past week or two.
Just have to take a serious look at a few features - if I can't get them working acceptably, they'll have to be scrapped or replaced with something else. Also I still have to make an easy way to disable Echo Base and the GCW - should be easy enough work, but it's been one of the lower priorities the whole time.
Anyway, just an update for the faithful. I appreciate those who are still tracking this. I still love doing it, can't wait to finish and play it a little, and am already full steam ahead on the next.