i don''t exactly remember what platform symphony was on, but all of the 2D Castlevania games were done with tiles, i''m pretty sure. if not, then they surely looked tile-ish...

for a game like FF7, you could do that, but it would be basically useless because there is so much detail as to how the levels are structured that you''d have some hellacious bounds checking for each single tile. if you are looking into that path, there was another post on those message board about depth maps that you should check into. the info those guys presented was very good. it''s either in this forum or Graphics programming forum. you might have to check back a week or two, cause i dunno how far it''s been pushed back.

for the level editor, i''ve had much experience because i''ve written 3 2D tile map editors. I''m almost done with the 3rd, done in MFC, which i''m extremely proud of.... but anyway (;-), you''d have to make your own file format (which isn''t hard) and make the code scalar so you could use it in your editor and in the game. it should load the same in the map editor and in the game, so if you write the loader/saver functions to save in internal variables inside your class (or struct if you lean towards C) you should be fine. just write your saver function and reverse the fwrite functions to fread and Voila! it saves and load the same.

hope that helped...
dw