With the basics of the sprite to cube model setup, I've gone in to working on an actual game engine.

Building the games engine is pretty straight forward, since it will only handle the models and not do any fancy conversions.

Currently the limit on model sizes is 16x16x16, although I planning on adding support for 16x32x16 for taller things like trees. I may expand this, but it depends on me getting the converting program to couple like blocks in rectangles to save on polygons/vertices. I already have two types of objects, 360 objects(all four faces) and face objects. Face objects are basicly walls/floors/cielings that you never are to see their backs, thus they aren't added into the model.

A recent uncapped FPS test on a single model was running 370-390, which is pretty nice since I'll will be shoving a lot of polys into scenes.

The success of this experiment has lead me to revive my older attempt of creating a 3d dungeon crawl maker, now I shall be making this one to function how I originally was designing 'The Crawl'.

Creating your own models is pretty easy, it works like an animation strip, but each frame represents a slice of the Z axis(depth) for the sprite.

Map creation will be object based, I'll be ditching the old method of a 4-sided wall chunk and now having individual wall faces per section of a map. Differing models for the objects will be color coded, much like how I originally did with the 'Crawl Creator' map maker.

I'm also leaning towards making it a real time combat game, more like Eye of the Beholder and Lands of Lore. Depends on how well I can get the overall game engine to perform, so far it looks promising that it runs nicely on a netbook, even when unplugged and lacking the 3d enhancements.

I'm not sure if this goes for all laptops, but one thing I noticed in netbooks is that if your not plugged in, a lot of 3d enhancements are disabled for the sake of battery over performance. This is kind of annoying, since one could get a nice 8-cell battery with 6-8+ hours on it.