Would this be possible? Obviously you'd probably lose the ability to simulate planets but it would be cool if we could do it outside the game. Cloud Imperium have a really cool WebGL thingy for viewing ships in 3D in the browser, which could be repurposed, as it uses open source .js libraries. Probably a post-1.0 thing though.
I love this idea. @neutrino did say they'd built the engine around being able to do this kind of thing. And communities are strengthened tenfold by having a free-users community that can interact with the first community but not with 100% of the content. If as a benign web surfer who'd never heard of or purchased PA, you came across PA's website where you could build a system, send it to the community to play on and watch a replay of people playing on it, or any other replay, you could get a fantastic taste of the game and have a huge incentive to buy it : that of getting yourself into the fray as well!
Right now without Uber's help we could somewhat do this. An entire system just gets saved as a json object with nothing more than the values you see in the system editor. We could recreate all of this in a web browser except the ability to preview planets. The PA file handler ColaColin set up would even let us have a button to open the system in PA if you want to preview it.
To make it even cooler, it would be possible to set the system up and then save it directly to System Sharing.
I always thought that just the system editor would be a very nice way of making a demo version. I'm afraid there's no point then. More than half of the editor appeal is the ability to look at those cute little things.
Unfortunately the preview feature is very closely tied to the rest of the game. I won't call it impossible but it is definitely not something that can be done without help from the devs. There is a good chance that it's totally impossible. Sure! How much are you paying me?
