After using Cesium for the last few weeks, I've noticed that there's a few deficiencies in billboard rendering compared to Google Earth. One of them is particularly noticeable when using labels (which I just now found out are actually billboards with text rendered to a canvas).
Looking through the issues list on Github and this group's archives, I see some existing issues and discussion:
* Scale billboards based on distance (
https://github.com/AnalyticalGraphicsInc/cesium/issues/93 )
* Size billboards in meters or pixels (
https://github.com/AnalyticalGraphicsInc/cesium/issues/287 )
* Ability to specify a rotation for billboards (
https://groups.google.com/d/topic/cesium-dev/F5IiJqtqR6w/discussion )
The two issues are 6 and 9 months old, and the rotation discussion dates back to December.
The distance scaling issue is the biggest behavior deficiency that I see. Google Earth starts shrinking label sizes as you zoom out, and eventually stops rendering them altogether. Cesium, on the other hand, leaves all labels the same size. If you've got a bunch of labels (say, one per country), zooming out far enough leaves you with a ton of labels all overlapping and hiding the earth.
The size and rotation specifications aren't as critical, but would certainly be highly useful additions to the API.
Is there any chance of these being worked on in the next few weeks? I'd happily work on them myself if I could, but I have absolutely no 3D or shader programming experience, and my current tasks at work have me busy full-time. I know you guys have various priorities already - just want to see where these features fit in.
For what it's worth, I did just pull down the PolylineMaterials merge, and it looks great! Been following the progress, and nice to see that work merged in. Updated my GWT-based application with a freshly-built copy of Cesium, wrapped the changes to the Polyline API, and it all worked the first time I tried. Very nice.
Thanks!
Mark Erikson