I made a 3D tile editor for Naked War. It's pretty game specific though and it is restricted to square tiles.
There's a video of an old version here:
http://www.zee-3.com/video/map_make.wmv
I use a single texture for the top surface of all tiles. New tiles are blended from multiple tilesets on the fly. The single texture is a kind of tile cache.
In response to some of the discussion above, I cluster the tiles in 10x10 chunks for efficiency. I haven't really experimented with varying the chunks size. Perhaps I should.
The editor has an UNDO\REDO feature which simply saves the entire map before every action and reloads it when required. Not a problem as the maps are only about 4-12K text files. I only store the low level info that matters, all polygon\texture info is inferred from that. So a level with 100K polygons might still compress down to 2K of data when sent as part of a game turn.
There's a video of an old version here:
http://www.zee-3.com/video/map_make.wmv
I use a single texture for the top surface of all tiles. New tiles are blended from multiple tilesets on the fly. The single texture is a kind of tile cache.
In response to some of the discussion above, I cluster the tiles in 10x10 chunks for efficiency. I haven't really experimented with varying the chunks size. Perhaps I should.
The editor has an UNDO\REDO feature which simply saves the entire map before every action and reloads it when required. Not a problem as the maps are only about 4-12K text files. I only store the low level info that matters, all polygon\texture info is inferred from that. So a level with 100K polygons might still compress down to 2K of data when sent as part of a game turn.