Hacker News Reader

Comment by notum | Hacker News Reader

Apologies for potentially asking a really silly question but: Cesium plugin is free and open source, however the Ion service (the actual data) is paid.

So of what use is the plugin without the streamed data? Can we choose to patch into Bing photogrammetry data as an alternative?

View on HN

Yes, you can load practically any dataset into Cesium, so you are not locked into their paid service and can self host. You might have to do a format conversion. I do think Ion is a nice service, and 3D globe data is going to be expensive no matter who you license it from.

I'm using the web version of Cesium in https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/ and I'm self hosting everything including the globe imagery, for free. (I don't need high resolution imagery for the whole globe because I only show a zoomed out view, but you could store and serve it all yourself in principle).

In addition to the nice 3D graphics I'm also using a bunch of Cesium functions for the actual satellite visibility calculations. It's a great library.

> https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/

Wow, super nice website, gonna use it to try to see some satellites from now on! Thanks for creating and sharing it.

Wow, I love your site! It makes such a big difference when you give the situated view of what the object in the sky will look like from my point of view, using Street View imagery. Totally raises the bar for any site giving you visibility predictions.

I'm sure that required a lot of fiddly details to get right, but it pays off hugely. And I can imagine it's the kind of thing that lots of people wouldn't even think of as important. Well done!

> So of what use is the plugin without the streamed data?

None, but so what? Being open source is useful even if the data you use it with is proprietary.

Absolutely. They just make a huge point about the plugin being open source, how that's "how business should be done", I thought there would be more to it, some useful tech beyond the same-old vendor lock-in or anything.

As a developer, having an open source client side is hugely beneficial. With closed source mapping libs you often know what is wrong with the providers library from your stack traces, but have no way to fix it. Open source means trivial bugs handling things like nulls and deallocation and even more serious bugs like CPU use regressions (which are easy to introduce with an incorrect condition somewhere and can slip through the cracks until end user's batteries are dying) become trivial fixes instead of: notify provider, provider may or may not road map a fix, provider may or may not provide the fix weeks later in their next closed source SDK update.

In theory you could create your own data source. I mean, good luck, but you could. I think keeping the data closed is totally fine in this case.

I haven’t looked deeply at this, but sophisticated level streaming for large areas isn’t something Unreal supports out of the box. Very cool of them to open source this.

> sophisticated level streaming for large areas isn’t something Unreal supports out of the box

Yes it is. I don't think this is replacing unreal's level streaming tech either. I'm reading this as a tool to generate content within unreal's existing landscape tiling/streaming tools.

You could potentially create a different world and use Cesium OSS to do 3d tile managing

Reply on news.ycombinator.com