I’ve been working on a platformer, since I want to transition away from just using grids to manage game interactions 
Anyways, here’s the result of a couple days meanderings: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?ommu3zetimk
I still am working out some things with it, and it’s mostly a tech demo, but I did make a very crude level editor that does work. Also, a screenshot is available here: http://validopinion.wordpress.com/2009/05/12/java-platform-game-experiments-continue/
Uses a lot of processing power, but it’s fun. Starts out slow though.
Thanks, yeah. I use an AMD 3000+, haha, but since I have an 8800GTS is runs really smooth for me, but I didn’t realize the high graphics card requirement of the skybox. I made a boolean switch for now to turn off the advanced skyboxish thing for a static one, and that upped the frames on my laptop from 25, to 85. I might upload that one soon, but I’m at school atm.
I’ll look into optimizing it a bit too, but since I’m quite new at Java, it may be hard for me
On my laptop I use about 21% of both cores, which is quite a lot, so I’m pretty sure there are some optimizations I could make. If I turn on the dynamic background the processing stays the same, but the fps drops considerably, so I think it’s probably something else. I’ll probably go through it with hotspot later and try some noob-like optimizations >:D
EDIT: this method is taking, by far, the most CPU usage. Of course, it’s the main draw method for all the tiles in the game. If anyone has any recommendations to speed it up, I’m all ears. As of now, I get a box around the player, and draw tiles from the map [][] to the screen that are visible. http://epitaph64.pastebin.com/m58620729