so yeah I did a whole TON of work today on this, mostly on the level editor. It now features 4x layers of backdrops (no 'mmf2 layer' is used because they cause huge slowdown), using:
1x Added Backdrop Layer (Collision Mask)
2x Text Blitters Layers (Background, Foreground)
1x Active Picture Layers (Parallax)
Yet even with all these, the game runs at 50 FPS, absolutely 0 slowdown. This is gonna be one heck of a level editor.
haha thanks, no those graphics are half things that I pilfered off of old projects of mine ( http://www.create-games.com/download.asp?id=7154 ) and half stuff I drew in MSPaint just so I'd have a tileset to work with!
hopefully once this moves into production as a real game, I'll get a real artist to pair up with :~)