I’m building a flight simulator application with two views:
A 2D top-down (god view) map with zoom in/out
A 3D first-person pilot view
The simulation will take place at different locations around the globe depending on the session.
My key technical questions:
The environment has NO internet connection (fully air-gapped / on-premises). What is the recommended approach to serve terrain and imagery tiles locally?
Does Cesium ion support pre-downloading or caching tiles for a specific geographic area for offline use? If so, is this permitted under the license terms?
I saw someone asking but the thread on premiss is broken 404
On the client side, Cesium for Unreal can stream in tiles from local sources, like if you have a directory with .3dtiles files. You can find out more information regarding that here:
On the server side we do provide a few capabilities to make offline use cases possible:
Cesium ion Self Hosted - This is our on-premise version of Cesium ion. It’s deployed via Kubernetes to any environment such as edge computing, local servers, or Cloud Services (AWS, Azure, OKE, GCP). Full deployment documentation here.
Cesium ion Asset Server via docker container - The capabilities of Cesium ion (tiling data, and serving data) can also be used with the tiling container used in Self Hosted. The section on “tiling and serving data without kubernetes”, subsection “Running the asset server” covers this. In this example you’d have a directory full of 3D Tiles that you can serve up into Unreal Engine directly.
Self Hosted and our tiling pipelines are paid products, if you’re interested you can reach out to sales@cesium.com or I can tell you more.
When you purchase Self Hosted, you also receive some datasets in full such as Cesium World Terrain, Sentinel 2 Imagery, Cesium World Bathymetry, and more. Those datasets are large, we do have capabilities to reduce Sentinel 2 from 500gb down to something around tens of gigs if your area of interest is 100 square kilometers.
Caching is something we are working towards in full, currently tiles are only held in memory.
Happy to answer any more questions you might have,