I've been tinkering with the Dungeon Carving and Isometric modes, and I think they're amazing. The problem is that they require massive setup time; once I got the hang of it, it still took me fifteen minutes to set up a single Isometric drawing set. Dungeon Carving I'm still not sure about.

If you're planning on re-using the same walls or paths throughout your quest, this is no big deal. A one-time investment of time saves oodles later - the saving of time when designing in isometric mode in particular is mind-blowing.

The problem comes in when you want to use many different wall or path or river styles. Or if you're using isometric mode for several things- I was using it to set up my forests. As the number of isometric tiles scales up, your time savings goes down.

I'm wondering if it's possible to simplify the setup of isometric and carving modes somewhat. This should, in theory, be possible, since we all go through the same routine motions to set up the tiles. For path tiles, for instance, we need only draw one-forth of a tile in three states: (Ill use water as an example) One all water, one a water corner, and one with water on three sides. For simple isometric tiles, I think this is all that you need; the rest of the tiles are just permutations of this one-forth of a tile.

Walls work sort of the same way. If Zelda Classic has a three example tiles: the top of the wall, the bottom of the wall, and the floor pattern, it should be able to spit out the complete carving set. All you'd be doing is rotating the tiles and overlapping them at a diagonal, usually.

Obviously you'd have to touch up the tiles later for some more complicated things. But so much of the setup for these modes is so predictable that I'd like to see it mechanized in some way.

Awesome job on the new beta, by the way. Astounding, even.

-C