After realizing that I was poorly rushing through my code and missing some big design flaws, I decided to take a week and just hit the notepad/pen and rework some of the major elements of my game engine. And I feel it paid off. I am able to get 30+ fps on my crappy laptop with 2mb of vid mem and a 266 mhz processor and 86+ fps on my desktop p3 933 mhz with 16mb vid mem.
You can download the demo here.
It features:
1-Full functioning map scrolling with custom clipping algorithms (that was the hardest hill to climb!)
2-Interactive GUI - you can use the sample combobox to adjust mouse movement speed.
3-No wasted blits as my custom clipping algorithms ignores tiles that are outside of the viewable area and properly clips/adjusts those that are.
Now that I've got these features in place I can start to work on the map/scenario editor (which I will *probably* release with the final game) and the troopers'/bots' AI.
Let me know what you think!