As with many programmers I dream of writing games and preferably getting paid for it. And not in EA style conditions either - I'm seeing something involving lots of curry, long sleep ins and large deposits to my bank account.

In any case it's unlikely to happen and so I wrote an isometric engine to amuse myself. By defining a number of elements and then a layered map using XML and a bunch of image files you can create an isometric environment. There's only a few features supported at present - fade in/out, map transitions, teleports, static animations and directional images (but no animation while moving).

It's written in an OO manner and in Java. But given Java2D is hardware accelerated it's far from slow (look at Puzzle Pirates for proof that you can write games in Java. Hurrah!).

Eventually I'll package it up but the code needs a little tidying first...