vsgCs fills a niche for those who want to use 3D Tiles and Cesium ion assets in a native application and who don't want or need all the features of a commercial game engine. Developers who are coming from the Open Scene Graph world will feel at home with the vsgCs code base and, indeed, VSG. We cannot reimplement all the features of a game engine, such as advanced rendering algorithms and graphical application editors, but we can rely on the VSG ecosystem to evolve and provide much functionality.
In the near term, we plan to implement these features:
- Credits system based on ImGui
- A GeoReference node to to fix the world in a local coordinate system
- Finish glTF primitive support
- handle multiple texture coordinate sets
- Make better use of supported Vulkan vertex and texture data formats
- Standalone glTF reader. This isn't directly supported by Cesium Native, but it would be helpful for testing glTF features that don't often show up in 3D Tiles.
- Overlay features
- Support for non Cesium ion overlays. This is probably close to working using Cesium Native; we just need to create the right objects. Work has started on this, with a pull request to Cesium Native.
- color to alpha
- Improved environment
- A real time-based lighting model with ephemeris
- sky box
- Caching asset accessor. vsgCs aleady provides an experimental option of using Cesium Native's SqliteCache, but we have seen problems of it "running out of memory."
- User interface for setting viewpoint, loading and reloading assets, etc.
In the longer term, and depending on the uses to which vsgCs is put, we propose these features:
- Intersections with terrain, height above terrain, etc. Otherwise known as "physics." Intersection testing is probably close to working already.
- Create missing tangent vectors in glTF source.
- Tile water mask
- Do "something" with metadata. Read it into VSG, query it during intersection testing, create alternative renders with it.