I believe this is still unsupported in Unity, while already being available in CesiumGS for a good time now?
It just makes zero sense to not have such an important feature for Unity as well higher on the priority list..
I know you guys could just say “anyone can try implementing it and submit a pull request”, but let’s be fair, you guys still do amazing work on Cesium, you bring updates quite frequently - so why is such a relatively simple and essential feature seemingly out of the question for one of the most important engines?
Thank you for your feedback on Cesium for Unity. Allow me to clarify a few things that were touched on in your post.
First, the water mask / classification feature is only applicable to data streamed via the quantized-mesh format. This format is engineered for worldwide terrain datasets. quantized-mesh allows a water mask to be passed in as metadata, which can be consumed at runtime to apply special water effects.
This is distinct from 3D Tiles, which Google uses to deliver Photorealistic 3D Tiles (and it makes sense to do this; the data contains both terrain and 3D buildings). Currently, 3D Tiles does not have an equivalent way to convey water mask metadata. However, even if it did, the responsibility is on the dataset authors to provide that. Cesium does not have any control or ownership over this data; we simply stream what Google provides through their Map Tiles API service.
I understand this can be frustrating. The best thing we can recommend is to submit feedback through Google’s website.
To return to Unity – yes, it would be great to have this feature in the package. It is currently not on our roadmap, but we appreciate any and all community input. I realize we never made a Github issue for this, which I’ve remedied here. It is also on us to properly communicate the scope of these features, so we will try to make this distinction clearer in the future.
Let us know if you have any follow-up questions or concerns. Thank you!