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Roadmap

v4.0

loaders.gl is developed under open governance by multiple contributors. While it is hard to catalog all ongoing work, current development tracks and aspirations include:

  • New loaders: GeoTIFFLoader, ZarrLoader, AVROLoader,
  • More comprehensive support for options.shape to control the output format of loaders.
  • More gLTF Extensions: EXT_mesh_features and EXT_structural_metadata for 1.1 3D Tiles attributes support
  • I3S: feature completeness and performance
  • ffmpeg WASM integration for @loaders.gl/video
  • EcmaScript module support
  • Unbundled loaders.
  • Replace Schema class with arrow schema if arrowjs tree-shaking improvements are satisfactory.
  • Node v18 support (as Node 16 is close to it's support end)

tile-converter functional extension:

  • Сonversion of S2 bounding volume to Oriented Bounding Boxes format (OBB)
  • Support conversion of non-indexed geometry
  • 3DTiles Implicit tiling 1.1 support
  • .3tz (3DTiles archive format) support for conversion into I3S
  • Better SLPK (I3S archive format) support:
    • Support Large SLPK (>2gb) input for tile-converter
    • Hash generation for SLPKs
    • i3s-server (part of tile-converter npm package) - serve SLPKs as a local HTTP server
    • slpk-extractor (part of tile-converter npm package) - extract an SLPK to a dataset that can be served via i3s-server
  • Pre-processing for conversion 3DTiles > I3S:
    • Detect topology type (for example TRIANGLE and TRIANGLE_STRIP will pass further for conversion, POINT or TRIANGLE_FAN will notify this mesh type is not supported for conversion)
    • Detect attributes classes for EXT_feature_metadata and for EXT_mesh_features extensions. Choose a class to convert in CLI with arrow keys.

tile-converter performance and usability optimizations:

  • Exclude Tileset 3D and Tile 3D classes during conversion (it gives a RAM usage improvement)
  • Tile-converter: offline conversion. No internet is required during the conversion process