What I'd like is a stupidly simple textured 3D landscape with billboarded sprites, maybe even viewed from a constant camera angle, with a decent-looking skybox and an easy way to draw my interface atop that.
you might also want to checkout soya3d, it handles smooth landscape generation from heightmap, billboards and has several predefined camera-modes. doesn't offer anything to help you with the interface though. http://home.gna.org/oomadness/en/soya3d/tutorials/index.html I used it for a shooter-game. It's alright once you got used to the sometimes strange nomenclature.
