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Oolite is the most obvious one. It faithfully recreates the Elite gameplay, but updates the graphics (slightly) and provides a simple way for others to expand the game. It is basically what you would end up with if you tried to write Elite (rather than 'some space trading/combat game') today.

Vega Strike has broadly the same gameplay mechanics as Elite, but is much richer; lots of different things to trade, different things available at different stations, different factions to join or fight, and so on. It also has massively improved graphics (detailed textures, gratuitous use of shaders) without that detracting from the game actually being fun.

Transcendence is a bit different. It's a 2D top-down game, but it has a lot of the things that made Elite fun. It's somewhere between XPilot, Elite, and Nethack. (It's Windows-only, but runs very well in WINE.)

Granted not many games use GDI.

This one does. The author picked the GDI approach (replacing older versions which used some DirectX) because it works better under WINE. I've not seen how it performs on Windows, but it runs well under CrossOver Games on OS X (and is highly addictive).

As I said, not many games use GDI.. I fondly remember playing "jezzball" and some other GDI-specific games back in the day, and I'm sure a number of those object-picking games are based on GDI. It's just that OpenGL / DirectX / SDL games are a lot more common...

Granted not many games use GDI.

This one does. The author picked the GDI approach (replacing older versions which used some DirectX) because it works better under WINE. I've not seen how it performs on Windows, but it runs well under CrossOver Games on OS X (and is highly addictive).

Another vote for Anacreon!

More specifically, a vote for the freeware rewrite: Anacreon is no longer a character-mode game. George Moromisato reimplemented the entire thing from scratch and -- crucially -- added netplay.

For those not familiar with Anacreon, it's a 4X turn-based space conquest game that delivers unusual depth despite its relative simplicity; it is complex without being complicated. Its hardware requirements are, accordingly, minimal. Yet IMHO it compares favorably with GalCiv II in several respects, and is significantly better than Master of Orion I/II or Space Empires IV (which is a game that attempts to be richly complex but only succeeds at being drably complicated).

at http://neurohack.com/transcendence/ This is by George Moromisato, the same guy who wrote Anacreon, back in the DOS 3.x days.

Anacreon is available there http://neurohack.com/ too, if you're taking character-mode programs. And where it used to be shareware, it's now free.

And I also second votes for FreeCiv, Vega Strike, and Wesnoth, among others.

at http://neurohack.com/transcendence/ This is by George Moromisato, the same guy who wrote Anacreon, back in the DOS 3.x days.

Anacreon is available there http://neurohack.com/ too, if you're taking character-mode programs. And where it used to be shareware, it's now free.

And I also second votes for FreeCiv, Vega Strike, and Wesnoth, among others.

Transcendence is free, extensible and bloody great fun!

Galactic Civilizations II, Transcendence, and Future Pinball are all that come up off the top of my head at the moment. For the latter, you'll want to pick up tables at VP-Originals. A ton of other games can be found at places like Abandonia Reloaded.

Also, Stardock offers the Object Desktop suite if you want to make Windows XP look less... XP-y.

Two that might be of interest for those looking for TBS empire-management games instead of mission-driven games are Anacreon and the Space Empires series.

The former is very high-level oriented: quasi-linear research tree, ship classes instead of ship design, assignment of priorities (e.g. "raw material world" for focusing on mining, "jumpship base" for producing jumpdrive ships, etc) and import/export policies (so you can demand that worlds try to be self-sufficient, or permit them to base their economy on imports brought in through transports on repeating-orders). Efficiencies matter in that specialized worlds are a LOT more efficient at what they do, but the required export/import system leaves you vulnerable to interdiction. Manage your worlds, produce minefields if you'd like, build massive industrial complexes that build ships with resources from adjacent worlds, put whole worlds on an addictive drug that removes the need for sleep but has /bad/ withdrawal consequences... It's not for the obsessive micromanager, and puts you more in the shoes of a grand strategist rather than tactician or city planner. Focus on the role for each planet, and amass fleets for use however you choose.

The latter is more suited for those desiring traditional tactical combat and ship design. It's also incredibly moddable (not just cosmetically; replace the entire tech tree(s) if you'd like, for instance, subject to limits about what abilities have been implemented of course. Want to produce a mod in which the only mining allowed is strip mining that eventually makes the mined worlds essentially worthless and uninhabitable? Want to make suns explode with a far higher probability? Want an optional facility that gives you greatly reduced, perhaps even negative, population growth in exchange for research? You could). You can (and must!) manage facility production on individual worlds, choose which research paths to focus on first, design your ship classes for a myriad of reasons, turn planets into asteroid fields or vice versa... and turn somebody's star into a black hole, obliterating everything in the system, if you want to send an obvious declaration of war.