[WIP] Planet preview creator script + service (?)

Matching a gif of a planet with the saved planet in system sharing would be an enormous contribution.

I'd be tempted to query for a closest match once the library of icons gets large enough (say, in the thousands) and use it for the Lobby or New Game pages.

I don't think a planet that is "close" would be very helpful. You need the exact planet.

How long does the generation of one such image take?

If the generation is fast enough, I wonder if we can have PA running on an AWS server just acting as a gif generation service. Would that be possible?

that would be quite awesome.
I'd query it all day. xD

At moment it's just POC so it use lot of time like 40-50 seconds, but it's actually generation time + timeout to make sure textures generated + 2 seconds video. For example I slept for about 7 hours and in this time previewer generated 500 preview images.

Convert MKV/frames to GIF take a while, but it's can be done by any headless server and I got some of these.

PS: Just to be clear on powerful hardware it's will able to create one preview in 5-10 seconds and for smaller planets only video creation mater. And obviously powerful video card and CPU can handle multiple instances of such tool.

Unfortunately video card is required. PA can work with software GL, but it's need powerful CPU so it's won't worth money. I got 100mbps at home and TBs of storage, but at moment I just stuck with bad CPU for some time.