James Hicks has an article up on Gamasutra describing his solo effort to create a game set in a galaxy-sized universe filled with 3D texture-mapped planets and stars, and using that as the setting for a multiplayer game.

I'm guessing he's a fan of "if it was easy, it wouldn't be worth doing."

In this Gamasutra article, he discusses some of the technical challenges of that first part -- crafting a universe filled with billions of star systems. (Hint: pseudorandom number generation FTW. )