Hi Yking,
I primarily work with 2D and I've made many editors and prototypes for 2D development. I have older tilemap editors, but they were from A6/A7 and I don't have any recent A8 ones. For a basic example, you can find my old 2D JRPG (pixel collision example) that uses full images for levels, but I need to update it with my new code since the old version has a few bugs.
http://www.opserver.de/ubb7/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=465319#Post465319I found it best (and faster) to create 2D environments with panels and use full image layers to piece the levels together. Pixel collision also helps and avoids hundreds of function calls from individual collision blocks. The only tricky thing about using panels is that there is no 3D camara to move and you must simulate that by moving the level around the player to create that effect.
Using a tileset and collision blocks you can create the levels dynamically, but it will take a lot more code and resources and you'll need to create some type of custom editor. Creating this in 3D with entities would work and give an actual camera to move, but that also involves using different image formats for sprites and PNG files don't work well as 3D sprites due to transparency issues. You'll also have to customize the 3D camera view to alter the perspective, otherwise seams will show and tiles will look offset as you move around because of the layer difference.
I would recommend using full panel layers and pixel collision which will create the same thing and run much faster than 100's/1000's of individual tiles/entities and collision blocks. It also makes it much easier to create a custom 2D camera since there are just a few images to move around.
Have a great day.
