Cesium in 2017 - what do you want to see?

Hi all,

As we gear up for what I believe will be the biggest year in Cesium’s history, we’d like to get some input from the community on where to focus our efforts.

Please reply with what is most important to you even if it is just a +1 for items already mentioned.

  • Finish 3D Tiles spec and Cesium implementation
  • Improved modules and deployment. Please be specific if possible, e.g., ES6 modules, webpack, etc.
  • glTF Physically-Based Rendering (PBR)
  • Improved maintenance, i.e., more and faster bug fixes. Also, please use GitHub’s +1 feature to help prioritize issues that are important to you.
  • WebGL 2 - mostly under-the-hood, but will have better rendering performance and visual quality (AA).
  • New or improved tutorials and code examples. Please be specific.
  • More opportunities to showoff your work, e.g., Cesium demos page, social media, conferences, etc.
  • Other features or improvements, e.g., subsurface visualization, specific visual quality improvements, polylines on terrain, polyline styles, etc.
    New this year, we are also going to quarterly review our progress and plan with a forum thread like this (in January, April, July, and October) to increase transparency and communication.

Finally, in addition to your feedback and enthusiasm, there are two big ways you can help Cesium:

  • By contributing code, doc, or even just answers to questions on the forum. In 2016, we had a record-breaking 35 new contributors (beyond the core Cesium team), compared to 27 in 2015. Get started here.
  • By providing funding to share the development costs. AGI, the company who started Cesium, funds the bulk of Cesium development and is happy to work with organizations who can provide funding to prioritize features or bug fixes. Email me directly and I will put you in touch.
    Looking forward to your input!

Patrick

Hi Patrick et al.,

As mentioned in this thread, what I (as well as several people who have e-mailed me to express their support) would like to see would be good support for the visual representation of fluid flow (winds, ocean currents, etc) in Cesium. That’s certainly quite a hard task to implement in generality, but now that current major Cesium core tasks like 3D tiles etc are nearing completion, I’m wondering if, and hoping that, it might be possible, as there are many users who would be very interested in utilizing this support when trying to visually display real, or simulated, (3+1)D winds or ocean currents, etc, within Cesium.

Thanks very much in advance to you and all of the excellent Cesium team,

Justin

FYI, a Google Groups issue and NOT a Cesium one, but the fact that the “this thread” link in the post above seems to be broken appears to be due to fact that the “Direct link” provided in the “Link to this topic” of the Topic Options of any Google Groups archived thread seems to just lead back to the forum itself.

The below should be a better link:

https://groups.google.com/forum/embed/?place=forum/cesium-dev&showsearch=true&showpopout=true&hideforumtitle=true&fragments=true&parenturl=http%3A%2F%2Fcesiumjs.org%2Fforum.html#!searchin/cesium-dev/fast$20animation/cesium-dev/nHuQrL5mvEY/-RTYmTQaEQAJ

(BTW, note that to get the above link, I had to use search within the forum, and then copy the link to the intended thread [without following said link], rather than using the “Direct link” to the thread provided by “Link to this topic” in Google Groups.)

Hi all,

As we gear up for what I believe will be the biggest year in Cesium's
history, we'd like to get some input from the community on where to
focus our efforts.

Rendering things sub-surface. My personal interest is in lake
bathymetry, and displaying dense datasets collected in the water
column, between the surface and the bottom, currently I just have them
hover above the lake. Others have expressed interest in rendering
other things underground.

Thanks for all your work, great tool.

Cheers -Terry

Patrick,

Label text improvement or alternative way to labeling.

Thanks

Ian

Altitude above ground level

+1 for improved modules and deployment, particularly integration with SystemJS.

Definitely polylines and other primitives on/relative to terrain. I think that’s a big piece of Google Earth compatibility that’s missing.

I'm trying to render Indoor-Spaces in 3D. My focus lies on sub-surface structures such as subway-systems and trainstations. It would be great, if Cesium would integrate functionality to do this.

My wish list:

  • Redesign the Texture atlas so image updates reuse the same space in the texture atlas.
  • Better handling of the Gimbal lock. I checked in the World Wind Java map and there is no issue.
  • More KML capabilities
  • Have a light version of Cesium with basic capabilities. for example, my projects will never use 3D models. Having a light version of Cesium, will it make any improvement in performance?

Thanks,

Alberto

+1!

Wow, it’s so great to see all this input so quickly! I put together a small Google Doc to help us spot trends in this thread. Keep the ideas coming!

Label text improvement or alternative way to labeling.

@Ian can you please be more precise? Are there specific issues in the Cesium GitHub repo you are interested in?

Altitude above ground level

@Klaus what exactly do you mean? Draw objects at a height above terrain?

@Jonathan really cool use cases for sub-surface. Do you happen to have a demo of your work-in-progress?

@Alberto said

Redesign the Texture atlas so image updates reuse the same space in the texture atlas.

Keep an eye on #2319

  • Better handling of the Gimbal lock. I checked in the World Wind Java map and there is no issue.

Can you please submit a issue for this with specific details?

  • More KML capabilities

What exactly? See #873

  • Have a light version of Cesium with basic capabilities. for example, my projects will never use 3D models. Having a light version of Cesium, will it make any improvement in performance?

This would not really help with performance other than Cesium.js being a smaller download. In what scenarios could performance be improved for your use cases?

Patrick

+1 on underground features (ie utilities)

The label text improvement is to the clarity of the label text which is typically quite poor and very difficult to read in our experience.

Thanks

Ian

+1 for additional labeling options.

  • Would really like to see basic “drawing tools”, such as the ability to draw polygons that filter map features in a predictable way.

  • Always interested in better KML/KMZ support.

Altitude above ground level

@Klaus what exactly do you mean? Draw objects at a height above terrain and

Sorry, I actually meant ‘above sea level’.Similar to KML’s ‘absolute’ altitudemode. I used that in my GE implemation for a GPS viewer where the data was specified ‘above sea level’. HeightReference.None in Cesium is ‘above the sea level’, which is different most of the times. Looks kind of strange when a GPS track runs into the ground…

Hi Cesium team,

Thank you for the great work!

I would like to see a more Google Earth type of camera flight (Cesium.Viewer.flyTo()), where the camera flies over the terrain and is pointed to target.

Probably related to https://github.com/AnalyticalGraphicsInc/cesium/issues/2501

Performance improvements are always +1

Thanks, Willem

Hi all,

  • support for local/multiple terrains. I mean support for precise local DTM(s) over a more global one like the STK terrain.

The idea is to be able to load a more precise terrain covering a specific area without having to provide a whole-earth terrain.

  • Mechanism allowing to clamp 3DBM tiles to the ground. Currently coordinates in 3DBM/GLTB/GLTF files are absolute ECEF 3D coordinates.

It’s very difficult to synchronize 3D models with the ground when a DTM is used.

Thanks again for this great software.

Fred.

Hi all,

- support for local/multiple terrains. I mean support for precise local
DTM(s) over a more global one like the STK terrain.
The idea is to be able to load a more precise terrain covering a specific
area without having to provide a whole-earth terrain.

+1

This would cover my below surface / lake bathymetry rendering "want to see"
perfectly - maintain the terrestrial terrain from STK and add local lake
bottom data.

Cheers -Terry

- Mechanism allowing to clamp 3DBM tiles to the ground. Currently

+MANY for TextureAtlas space reuse! My guess is that most use cases for continual updates of a billboard image involve redrawing on the same size canvas based on data, so it should be very feasible to keep updating the same chunk of texture for a given billboard.