Unfortunately, they are still there. We are working on the rotation
issue, and we have made some progress there, but it is not fixed yet.
The problem is that our resources are limited. Currently, only Kristian
and myself are working on GEF3D. We "only" fix bugs and add new
features if we need them for our work (Kristian is writing his diploma
thesis using GEF3D, and I'm working on my Ph.D. thesis).
We are looking for help, and I invite you (and everyone else) to
contribute to GEF3D. Although we (Kristian and I) don't have the time
to implement all these things, we would be glad to help you doing it.
Some remarks on the limitations:
- selecting connections is on my agenda, but I don't know when I will
be able to implement this (maybe May?)
- rotation is a severe problem, and we made a lot of progress fixing
that problem. I hope that we will fix that in a couple of weeks. As far
as I know Kristian needs that feature for his work...
- Kristian has ported the ecore-Editor to 3D, and I'm not sure whether
he has fixed some GMF related issues on the way.
The other issues (direct edit, handles for 3D editing, scrolling
planes) currently are not on our agenda. Especially scrolling planes
are not planed, I'm even not sure if this would make sense in a 3D
editor.
Another question is if we should change the technique for displaying 2D
content on the planes. Currently, 2D content is painted into a texture,
and then this texture is applied on the surface. Instead of painting a
texture, we are thinking of directly render 2D content on the surface,
using 3D techniques. As a matter of fact Kristian has already
implemented a 3D-version of the Graphics interface (this is how SWT
paints 2D contents), and this version is already used for creating the
textures. Changing the strategy of painting 2D content on the surfaces
will dramatically increase the quality of the diagrams, but we are not
sure of how much it would decrease the performance. In that context we
are thinking about introducing level-of-detail techniques.
I have added bug reports for the listed limitations and I will move the
limitation overview to the Eclispe Wiki.