The one thing that Cesium doesn't really provide is really good 2D map support (i.e. ortho). Mapbox really shines here and its mostly due to their Mapbox GL stuff and Vector Tiles. It would be nice to have a leaflet-like GL accelerated mapping framework (the mapbox GL API is vastly different than leaflet and is horrid in comparison). Mapbox GL also doesn't support any other projection besides mercator.
It would be nice to have an alternative to them as they are increasingly more and more corporate and a hot mess internally.
For mobile development, Mapbox mobile SDKs, Carto mobile SDK and Tangram SDK (RIP) are supported.
On the desktop, you can use either QT or .NET with our maps.
More info: https://www.maptiler.com/blog/2018/05/openmaptiles-gives-you...
Emphasis mine.
Free as in beer another person administers to you with a spoon until they don't feel like it anymore.
I actually self-generated an entire worldwide Cesium quantized-mesh terrain dataset myself a few months ago, based on the ALOS30 terrain dataset [1]. As a prerequisite, I modified the open-source `cesium-terrain-builder` tool to support writing output to MBTiles files [2].
I've been wanting to write a blog post about the process, but have had too many other things on my todo list. Also, it's probably simpler to just purchase whatever they've got available. Still, if you've got questions, be happy to try to answer them.
[0] https://openmaptiles.com/downloads/tileset/satellite/
[1] http://www.eorc.jaxa.jp/ALOS/en/aw3d30/index.htm
[2] https://github.com/geo-data/cesium-terrain-builder/pull/61
