yeah first of all the usual "This is a great programm and i love it stuff"
And well i even mean it!! It's cool to play god and go create a sun and some planets or to just travel around.
But just recently i started to create my own Solarsystems, based on some data from a german SciFi-Series. And there i ran into some trouble, well not really trouble, more like an annoyance. This system (Arkon), which can be found on my website btw. (sorry only german language at the moment), has a lot of planets and moons. I should have probably started with something smaller, but done is done.
So i had to create all the necessary data, with the help of the solar system generator and copy and paste from our solarsystem this was okay to do.
But what i am missing at the moment is some more or less small programm that is able to show the ssc file in 3D-Space, like Celestia. If you aren't able to create a picture of 10 moons orbiting a planet in your mind, with all the elements correct, it is a lot of work to really finetune a system.
Because you have to start Celestia, take a look at the system, find what's wrong (in your idea) end Celestia, manipulate the ssc-file. Start Celestia again and see if the change had the desired effect. If not repeat procedure!!
Now my idea, take the engine from Celestia, add a open save dialog for ssc-files and a refresh memory button. No texture loading or other stuff, just plain orbits (shown) and round objects for planets/moons. And an onscreen orbit editing mode. Right click on object (or whatever method) select parameter (i.e. eccentricity), change with slidebar or input and see instant result on monitor.
If you like what you see, save it to disk. (and make automated backup of original)
Okay, this is just an expression of hope that someone would find enough time to do it. Since i don't know much about programming i don't have a clue how difficult this is. But i really think this could be very usefull for everyone.
