I’m trying to set up my dev box to point to a free internet-facing terrain service. In production, we’ll be on a network that has access to an ArcGIS terrain tile service, so I’m trying to avoid the hassle of handling an authenticated service just for my own dev work. I looked at the available Providers and VRTheWorld jumped out at me as having a service URL in the docs without needing a login or API key.
I tried the sample in the docs, as well as the Terrain example on SandCastle, and I can’t get it to load. The parent company’s page about VRTW Online is still there but doesn’t actually include a link.
Does anybody else use this service, or have more information about what happened to it? Alternately, is there another free online terrain service I could use? Even if there’s a very coarse static dataset I could download and host myself, I think I’d rather do that than have to deal with managing credentials. I just need to be able to turn terrain on to test some issues my users are having.
Hmm, the VRTheWorld example here https://sandcastle.cesium.com/index.html?src=Terrain.html fails in the hosted Sandcastle but works locally for me, because it’s attempting to load it over HTTP and the browser rejects that when Sandcastle is running over HTTPS.
I thought I tried the URL as both HTTP and HTTPS, but just now I tried http://www.vr-theworld.com/vr-theworld/tiles1.0.0/73/ again and it worked – before, I was getting “{IP} is taking too long to respond” from multiple browsers. Maybe it was just “down for me”. The provider works fine over HTTP since I’m doing my dev work with Chrome’s disable-web-security flag anyway.
FYI, the docs do list https in the example code, and that definitely isn’t available, so at least it might be worth updating. I don’t know what to do about the Sandcastle, I guess it just won’t be possible to use them normally until they upgrade their server to support SSL?
Thanks for reporting this - I don’t remember the VRTheWorld example being broken, despite Sandcastle being on https for a while now. Opened an issue here to discuss what to do about the Sandcastle example: https://github.com/CesiumGS/cesium/issues/8935