TerriaJS release 8.5.0 - Cesium upgrade

[nf-s]

• Change terriajs-cesium main branch to main - with latest changes
• Add cesium CHANGELOG (see comment)
• Test it

[nf-s]

Cesium upgrade from 1.92.0 to 1.113.0. You can see the full list of changes here

• https://github.com/CesiumGS/cesium/blob/main/CHANGES.md#1113---2024-01-02

High-level changes that may be of interest:

Breaking changes

• Firefox 114 is now the minimum Firefox version required to run CesiumJS. #11400

Additions

• Vertical exaggeration can now be applied to a Cesium3DTileset. Exaggeration of Terrain and Cesium3DTileset can be controlled simultaneously via the new Scene properties Scene.verticalExaggeration and Scene.verticalExaggerationRelativeHeight. #11655
• Added createGooglePhotorealistic3DTileset to create a 3D tileset streaming Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles.
• Added smooth zoom with mouse wheel. #11062
• CesiumJS now defaults to using a WebGL2 context for rendering. WebGL2 is widely supported on all platforms and this results in better feature support across devices, especially mobile.
  • WebGL1 is supported. If WebGL2 is not available, CesiumJS will automatically fall back to WebGL1.
  • In order to work in a WebGL2 context, any custom materials, custom primitives or custom shaders will need to be upgraded to use GLSL 300.
  • Otherwise to request a WebGL 1 context, set requestWebgl1 to true when providing ContextOptions as shown below:

    const viewer = new Viewer("cesiumContainer", {
      contextOptions: {
        requestWebgl1: true,
      },
    });

• Added experimental support for 3D Tiles voxels with the 3DTILES_content_voxels extension. The current implementation is intended for development use, as the voxel format has not yet been finalized and is subject to breaking changes without deprecation.
• Added support for I3S 3D Object and IntegratedMesh Layers. #9634
• CesiumJS has switched to a new architecture for loading glTF models and tilesets to enable:
  • User-defined GLSL shaders via CustomShader
  • Support for 3D Tiles Next metadata extensions: EXT_structural_metadata, EXT_mesh_features and EXT_instance_features
  • Support for EXT_mesh_gpu_instancing
  • Support for EXT_meshopt_compression
  • Texture caching across different tiles
  • Numerous bug fixes
• Usage notes for the new glTF architecture:
  • Those using ModelExperimental.fromGltf() should now use Model.fromGltf().
  • The enableModelExperimental flag was removed, as tilesets and entities always use the new architecture.
  • The new implementation of Model uses the same public API as before, so no other changes are necessary.
• Models and tilesets that use the CESIUM_primitive_outline extension can now toggle outlines at runtime with the showOutline property. Furthermore, the color of the outlines can now be controlled by the outlineColor property. #10506
• Improved rendering of ground and sky atmosphere. #10063

Fixes

• Changes the default RequestScheduler.maximumRequestsPerServer from 6 to 18. This should improve performance on HTTP/2 servers and above. #11627
• Fixed Repeated URI parsing slows 3D Tiles performance #11197. Together with #11211, this can reduce tile parsing time by as much as 25% on large tilesets
• Fixed atmosphere rendering performance issue. 10510

[mwu2018]

@nf-s
There is no main branch in terriajs-cesium repo https://github.com/TerriaJS/cesium/. I can see two major branches

• terriajs
• terriajs-new

terriajs currently uses v6.2.0 of terriajs-cesium. What is the procedure of releasing new version of terriajs-cesium?

Since we are testing the new releases, should we make them alpha versions?