The road to terrain on by default

[pjcozzi]

Just trying to scope all the work required to have terrain on in Cesium by default. Feedback and missing items are encouraged!

7/26/108 edits by @mramato

Required

• Polylines on terrain, Vector Data on Terrain #2172
• Labels/billboards partly hidden by terrain, Labels/billboards on terrain and depthTestAgainstTerrain #2694
• User defined clipping planes for 3D Tiles insets User-defined clipping planes #5765
• Make geocoder do a height query so that it does not fly under terrain. Make Geocoder terrain-aware #6876
• Make Viewer do a height query when zooming to non-global imagery extents
• depthTestAgainstTerrain defaulted to true depthTestAgainstTerrain default? #2160
• Height reference for remaining geometry types Add HeightReference to more geometry types #6777
• A blog post to accompany standard CHANGES.md that goes into more details about the impact on existing apps.
• Fix classification bug: Classification type ignored when depthTestAgainstTerrain is true #6568
• Zooming to clamped billboards KML viewer.flyTo placemark goes underground #4327
• Ground geometry outlines Support for polygon outlines on terrain #6694
• Terrain broken in 2D rotatable mode Terrain produces unexpected results in rotatable 2D #7010
• In KmlDataSource don't require options.clampToGround = true when KML inherently clamps to ground KML and clampToGround option #8239

Nice to have

• Terrain LOD skipping
• Other billboard/terrain issues? Billboards on terrain - some problems #4686

Definitely later

• Points on terrain, Point, billboard, and labels roadmap #2685
• subsurface: Support for subsurface / bathymetry #5665

CC #526, #2524

[pjcozzi]

Lots of interest in terrain on by default according to our highly scientific twitter poll:

https://twitter.com/CesiumJS/status/925361894248013824

[mramato]

After some offline conversations, and given the awesome work the community has done over the last few months, the time has come at last to enable terrain by default. The plan is to do this for Cesium Oct 1st release (1.50). While some of the checkboxes in this issue are still valid, the scope for terrain on by default is actually fairly small so let's try to keep the discussion geared towards what is absolutely needed.

I'll re-arrange the original checklist above into what we still considered required and what is probably "nice-to-have" but please chime in with your own list if we are missing things.