Cesium JavaScript Globe Setting Night Image

Question

I used to be able to set the night image to the centralBody, but that is no longer available in the latest version I downloaded - B26.

Is there an alternative to the previous:

centralBody.nightImageSource

Or increase the overall brightness to reduce the shadow opacity from the previous:

centralBody.dayNightBlendDelta 

and

centralBody.nightIntensity

?

Answer 1

This feature was removed over a year ago (in b11) with pull request #348. Currently, the only night shading supported by Cesium is via the centralBody.enableLighting property; for example if you're using the Viewer widget you can enable lighting withviewer.centralBody.enableLighting = true;. That being said, the plan is to eventually put back similar capability.

You can read more at the linked pull request, but to summarize, the reason it was removed is because it was a major performance killer, not just in overall framerate but in shader compile and link time as well, which caused startup to be extremely slow. Removing it also cleaned up the overall code tremendously. We (the Cesium team) definitely plan on re-introducing this capability in the future, but using completely different techniques and fixing some of the usability issues with the old implementation (such as fading out nightlights when you zoom into the globe). There's no timeline on when this will happen, but if any developers are interested in working on it, we are always looking for new contributors.