Playback Details
(This is part of the Widget roadmap.)
As of this writing, the master branch CesiumViewerWidget has a toolbar that looks like this:
The proposed replacement Playback widget pops up looking like this:
The bottom-left is "Reset" (same as before). On the right is faster/slower, same as before. The large middle button acts as a play/pause toggle, or really a pause/un-pause toggle where "un-pause" puts you back into whatever mode you might have been in before pause (rewind, realtime, etc).
The upper-left button is called "Shuttle ring." Clicking it results in this:
The shuttle ring is may look familiar to folks who have used video editing systems. It is a ring offering a continuous control of forward and backward speeds. You can slide the "green glow" indicator smoothly around its entire edge, like this:
There is also a button tucked under the top-center of the ring, called the realtime button. It sets the time to "now" (from the computer's own clock) and animates along at real time. Pausing this mode for a length of time, and then un-pausing via the center button, will cause it to jump forward to catch up with realtime. Using the shuttle ring will pop out of realtime as you expect, and animate forwards or backwards from there.
This functionality is available for testing now on the playback branch. It's implemented in
SVG and works on mobile (FF & Chrome for Android), although currently you can only tap, not slide the
shuttle ring on mobile (touch events not hooked up yet, pending resolution of the camera and pinch-zoom
branches). In the meantime you can test it as a work-in-progress on mobile, and more fully test
it on a desktop/laptop.
One remaining needed feature is the ability to apply themes. After some discussion, the proposed plan involves adding a CSS style sheet, reading values from that sheet in JS, and constructing the SVG gradients based on the values read. This would allow simple CSS styling of something that otherwise would require changes to SVG-generating JS code. Again, feedback welcome, particularly from third parties who are trying to integrate Cesium with other systems.