Hoping someone might know how to do this. Is there a way to specify a portion of the globe which is rendered complely flat (like a traditional UE4 landscape)?
Thanks in advance 
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Hello,
Currently, there is no way to render a portion of the globe completely flat - the tiles inherently account for the curvature of the earth. If this is a feature you’d like to see in the plugin, I’d love to hear more about your use case - and, if there are other users looking for the same thing, please chime in!
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Hello @agallegos, thank you for the reply!
The use-case is a sailing experience in the Caribbean. Including roughly the area of the Gulf of Mexico, Eastern coast of Florida, Central American Coastline and ending around Trinidad & Tobago.
Due to the nature of the sailing experience, we require a perfectly flat representation of the world, even if this comes with some distortion. It allows us to use less complex simulations for many areas (ocean surface, sailing and wind) while still representing a level of location realism.
I appreciate this isn’t as easy to implement as perhaps I had originally hoped, but this feature alone would certainly increase the usefulness of Cesium within Games, due to the expectation of traditional flat maps in most use-cases.
Thanks again,
Tyler
Hi @Tylru,
I spoke with some of the developers and it looks like attempting to flatten out the world would be very complicated. It likely won’t be part of the plugin in the near future.
I agree that a flat map would certainly simplify development in a lot of areas. We have previously explored planetary gravity, you can read the issue here. In particular, the issue contains links to plugins that can approximate directional gravity in Unreal Engine. A solution like that may work for your use case. If you try it, please let us know how it goes!
I am also very much interested by a flat terrain.
I am looking for a terrain engine to fill the gap between Unreal landscape (limited in size) and Cesium for Unreal (unlimited). I am rendering a terrain of ~80km2.
What I do to simulate a flat terrain with Cesium for Unreal is I compensate the heightmap accordingly to the WGS84 ellipsoid reference so that the sea altitude will always be 0 in Unreal coordinates. To achieve this, each point of the heightmap is adjusted by an offset corresponding to the height difference on the ellipsoid relatively to the center of the map.
Cf. I cannot have a consistent z=0 level - #8 by 0x974
This is a quick & dirty hack but it works.
That allow me to use for example Oceanology with Cesium for Unreal.