2.5D breaks free.. and future plans

I assume Kristian will tell you more in a future post, but I simply couldn't wait to show you this picture:

GEF3D ecore editor (rev. 436)

It shows a screenshot of the 3D-fied version of the ecore tools editor, which is part of the GEF3D examples. Compare this image (GEF3D rev. 436) with the following one, taken using an elder version (rev. 413 ) of GEF3D showing the very same diagram:

GEF3D ecore editor, rev. 413

Do you see the difference? Yeah! 2D figures are no longer bound to their diagram plane! In other words: 2.5D breaks free! (If you don't know the term 2.5D, read our tutorial article about GEF3D available at Jaxenter.com!) Besides, the display quality of 2D content has improved since it is now rendered as vector graphics and no longer as a smudgy texture projected onto a plane. Usually, increased display quality leads to decreased speed, but not in this case! Actually, GEF3D is no longer a limiting factor when displaying large diagrams -- it's GEF (or GMF). The texture based version of GEF3D had a problem with diagrams containing about 5.000 (2D) nodes. The new version runs smoothly even with this much nodes! However, you may get a memory problem when opening such large diagrams (due to GEF/GMF), but if you can open it, the camera can be moved smoothly! Great work, Kristian! He has become a real 3D programming pro, and I'm absolutely impressed about how he improved GEF3D in the last weeks. Stay tuned to his post about this new technique!

At the moment, Kristian is working on also replacing the texture based font rendering with vector fonts, which will dramatically improve the overall quality of the rendered images. Besides, the GEF3D team has set up a todo list, summarizing bugs with new features (to be implemented in the near, not so near and far future):

http://wiki.eclipse.org/GEF3D_Todos

The most important tasks are to add support for full 3D editing, e.g. moving and resizing figures in z-direction and rotation, implement advanced animation support and, depending on that, camera tracks. If you have ideas, please post an article on the GEF3D newsgroup!

I certainly have some bias, but with vector based 2D content (and fonts) and camera tracks (e.g., for positioning a diagram in a kind of 2D view), the quality and comfort of editing a 2.5D diagram will become the same as editing it with pure GEF in 2D. But with GEF3D, you can work with multiple diagrams much more comfortable: If you have to edit multiple diagrams with inter-model connections, you will be able to simply navigate to another diagram (and back again). And you can actually see the inter-model connections (for an example read Kristian's post about his 3D GMF mapping editor). 2D is dead, long live 3D!

Well, ok, I have probably watched too much Avatar 3D ;-). But maybe you like the idea of cool 3D diagrams, too? Then join the GEF3D team, grab yourself a bug and see how much fun 3D programming with GEF3D could be! Yes, I know... there is no release of GEF3D available yet... I will do that as soon as possible, and I hope with the help of Miles Parker we will be able to set up a build system shortly. So long, use the project team set and check out GEF3D from the SVN repository, an installation tutorial can be found in the Wiki.

Last but not least, I'm happy to announce the third and (so far) last part of our GEF3D article series in the german Eclipse Magazin, 2.10. In this part, Kristian and I explain how to 3D-fy existing GMF editors.

Jens