Overview

This is a summary of a setup and workflows for developers who want to work with the Cesium for Unreal plugin. Such a setup consists of three main components:

• cesium-native : A collection of engine-independent libraries for 3D Tiles, geospatial, etc. Most of the functionality of Cesium for Unreal is built based on these libraries.
• cesium-unreal : The source code of the actual Cesium for Unreal plugin.
• An Unreal project that uses the plugin. We will use the cesium-unreal-samples as an example here, to get started quickly. It contains sample levels for different use cases, and can therefore be used to quickly check for possible regressions of feature changes.

Note: It is generally possible to work with cesium-native independent of cesium-unreal. But any modification in cesium-native will have to be checked carefully for possible breaking changes in the API or the build process. So the following describes the developer setup from the perspective of someone who wants to work with cesium-native mainly in the context of cesium-unreal.

Principles

There are detailed instructions for setting up a Cesium for Unreal development environment on each platform. But if you're already used to doing this sort of thing, you can probably use whatever workflow you like as long as you follow some important principles:

• To build Cesium for Unreal, you must first compile and cmake-install cesium-native and its dependencies to Plugins/cesium-unreal/Source/ThirdParty.
• cesium-native is built and installed using CMake and the CMakeLists.txt found in the cesium-unreal/extern directory, not the one in the cesium-unreal/extern/cesium-native directory. When installing from this directory, the default install path will put cesium-native where Cesium for Unreal expects to find it.
• You must use the same compiler to build cesium-native and Cesium for Unreal.
• On Windows, packaging the Cesium for Unreal plugin on Windows requires Visual Studio 2017. This means you must also build cesium-native with Visual Studio 2017 in order for plugin packaging to be successful. But if you're not concerned with packaging, you can use Visual Studio 2019 exclusively.
• The Unreal project "DebugGame" configuration tries to use the debug build of cesium-native if one is built and installed, and falls back on the release build otherwise. The "Development" and "Shipping" configurations use the release build exclusively.
• Our CI build process checks for formatting using clang, and fails if code is improperly formatted. To run clang on all source code before committing, run npm ci to install node modules, then npm run format.

Platform-specific setup instructions

• Windows
• Linux
• macOS

Deployment instructions

• The Packaging Guide describes how to create a package and use it in a local Unreal installation. This is similar to installing it from the Unreal Engine Marketplace, but allows testing non-release branches.
• The Release Process describes the necessary steps to publish a new version of the plugin to the Unreal Marketplace.