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Cesium Version 1.6 Released

We are pleased to announce that Cesium version 1.6 is now available for download.

This is our largest release since 1.0. Here are just a few of the many highlights:

  • Fixed an issue with order independent translucency that caused flickering and rendering artifacts on many video cards, particularly Intel GPUs. If you were previously disabling order independent translucency, it should no longer be necessary.
  • GeoJsonDataSource and Entity instances now support polygons with holes.
  • Improved performance of asynchronous geometry creation (as much as 20% faster in some use cases). #2342
  • Made many major enhancements to the Entity API for ease of use. Also added viewer.entities which allows you to easily create and manage Entity instances, and two new camera helpers, viewer.zoomTo and viewer.flyTo, both of which take an entity, array of entities, EntityCollection, or DataSource as a parameter and zoom or fly to the corresponding visualization.
  • Many Sandcastle examples have been rewritten to make use of Entities.
  • Added Quaternion.fromHeadingPitchRoll, Transforms.headingPitchRollToFixedFrame, and Transforms.headingPitchRollQuaternion to make it easy to create rotations from from heading, pitch, and roll angles.
  • Also added Camera.setView, which use heading, pitch, and roll to make orienting the camera easy.

For the full list of changes, see the change log.

A screenshot from Cube Cities, showing available Space in The Empire State Building.

Other recent news and postings

  • There’s been a lot of planning and discussion on the forum for Cesium in 2015.
  • A brand new tutorial, Visualizing Spatial Data, was also released today. It’s targeted towards users of all skill levels and provides a good overview of the newly enhanced Entity API and related capabilities.
  • We also recently had a guest blog post from Cube Cities on their migration to Cesium.
  • Most of the Cesium team is attending, and AGI is sponsoring, the OSGeo Philadelphia Code Sprint. If you’re in the area, we would love to see you there!
  • create.io, a Cesium based real-estate investment and data application, has launched.
  • We added a new showcase, Cycling the Alps
  • The Cesium team at AGI is looking for a Web Application Developer.
  • Our first release to officially support KML is almost here.