Thanks. Things are going reasonably, but this is definitely the most difficult area for me. After muddling through LWJGL (which is what Minecraft uses for portable graphics) and LibGDX (which is built on top of that and adds other game-related capabilities), I did manage to get the basic rendering of the tiling system I needed in order to get a sense of how this will work.

Details of how to use it most effectively, how to make reasonable sense of layering different kinds of data, and how to make sure that the 2D spatial environment is rendered in a way which makes sense are still to be determined.

The bigger problem is that this will never look "good" since I am not an artist, much less a 3D artist. I just hope that it looks understandable.

Of course, I am also making it extra difficult for myself since I am not using the LibGDX facilities (which seem quite nice) beyond using it to start up the graphics environment (the same thing I was doing with the LWJGL experiment - which was easier but LibGDX does solve some other problems for me, later on). From there, I am just using vanilla OpenGL ES 2. This is mostly just because I want to actually understand how it works and play around with it in some minimal way. The "right" way to do it is probably to ignore that or the lower-level LWJGL stuff and fully adopt LibGDX. I might do that in the future but this is interesting, for now.

I really just want to get this up to a minimal point so I can progress to the network layer and crafting/interaction system, since those will be closer to my wheelhouse and challenging in less tedious ways.

Jeff.