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Here are a couple suggestions:

1. When you place a tile or entity in the map editor, why not place a small number in the tile/entity's upper-left corner, telling the user what layer that tile is currently on.  A feature like this is implemented in clickteam products.  This could make editing a bit more stream-lined for quick layer identification.  It will also help prevent users from accidentally placing an entity too high or too low.

An example might be:

User places a tree, which consists of the trunk tiles, and then the tree leaves.  The main part of the tree will be placed on the same layer as the 'trunk' anyway, but the edges of the trees' leaves will be one layer higher.  However, if a user has infinite layers in future versions of solarus, and may need to move a tile to a different layer temporarily, they may forget to return a tile to the layer it needs to be and it may render incorrectly at runtime.

2. Having the ability to copy/paste or duplicate tiles in the tile editor.  It would be a lot faster if you had the ability to draw tiles, select one or more tiles, and then paste them to new locations on the tile sheet for a much faster tileset creating process.  If a user has a tileset that contains duplicate, but recolored tiles within the same tileset, copying a completed section of the tileset, then pasting that new data into the unfinished section(s) would exponentially speed up the tile making process.  Size, animation type, default layer, and path properties can also be transferred to the pasted tiles.

The beach tiles have been included, they were simplified to allow you to place them over any tile you like.  The Waterfall tiles can be included as well as the urchins.  As far as the translucent water tiles I should be able to add them but only a singular 16 x 16 animated tile you can resize.  The cloud tiles can be created in similar manner by using the existing cloud tiles.  All you need to do is change their properties to irreversible ground.

Edit - waterfall tiles, tiny tree stumps, and recolored mine entrances have been updated.  I couldn't simplify the translucent water wave effect, as it was a unique 64 x 64 tile, so I had to include it as-is.

I just updated the overworld tileset.  It has been massively increased and a plethera of tiles have been added, reorganized, and colors corrected better.

There is no data file for it yet, but I will upload the tileset anyway.  Please keep in mind that the tileset itself is not complete either.  Some colors may not be corrects yet, and there might be a repeat of some tiles but it will be corrected in future releases.  Thanks for understanding

Enjoy!

Well, I am hoping that in a future version of Solarus, Chris will create a HUD editor to simplify making HUDs.  That way you could create a single HUD entity sprite sheet and matching HUD entity dat file, and the LUA script would just read from the data file.

You could also have it read multiple HUDs during gameplay, such as switching between the main HUD and the Ocarina HUD, or allow ease of enabling or disabling of item buttons.  I believe he said he had considered this at one point but do not remember.

As far as LttP HUD assets, most of these are included in Chris' pack for Mystery of Solarus.  There exist most of the item icons, windows, the dialogue font, and HUD icons such as Rupee icon (the real LttP one and not the larger ones he used in MoS), arrow, bomb, and key icons, and the life bar that appears above the heart containers.

The menu for LttP consisted of about 5 individual windows that were 'pulled' into the frame when the game was paused that contained the icons.

Currently, Amine M is working on a complete remake of A Link to the Past using the Solarus engine.  You can find his videos on youtube here:

https://www.youtube.com/user/aminemax1987

Also, if you look at the red, blue, green, yellow, and gray tiles near the chests, you will notice they are transluscent.  These can be used as either dynamic tiles or you can put them down temporarily to be used as placeholders for crystal switch blocks. 

In the current project I uploaded for Chris, I think I included several crystal switch blocks with matching crystal switches, as well as a modified crystal light switch, which I might replace later with PZE's light switch. 

In a very old project I once had using Clickteam Fusion's engine, I actually had completely different sprites for a number of entities:

Crystal switches that more resembled Ocarina of Time's.  These crystals were diamond crystals just like the LttP Maiden crystals, that hovered over a small plaque.  When Link hit the crystal, it would spin once and fade into its opposite color. 

I originally had bombs that would fade/glow red to better emulate the bombs from Ocarina of Time.  The fuse would shrink, and once the fuse reached its base, the bomb would change to a very dark blue; almost black, and upon explosion, would transition from a blue flaming explosion to a red one just like the OoT bombs.

I even had arrows that used real world physics.  Just like bullets fired from a gun, the arrows would 'spin' as they moved through the air.  The feathers on the blunt of the arrow would spin in an infinite loop until the arrow landed.

Okay, the quests load MUCH faster, almost instantly.  However, when you start a game from the quest editor or the quest launcher, the "Play" changes to a stop icon like it should, and the play button from the quest launcher grays out like it should.  But when you close the game, the play button in quest editor is still a stop button, and the play button in quest launcher is still grayed out.  The only way to play the game again is to completely exit out of Solarus to reset the play button.

Thanks a lot for all the support.  I am humbled and grateful there are people out there who are appreciative of what I am doing for Solarus.  I am no coder, and my knowledge of LUA is noob status.  In fact, the only programming language I ever learned was COBOL but that was years ago.

So, as stated on Chris' last marathon stream, "Those who can't do, teach.  Those who can't code, sprite!"

That being said, I will try and bring as much of LttP to Solarus as I can if I am able.  If possible, my original goal was to bring the PZE graphics (items, HUDs, buttons, etc) to Solarus, but for the time-being I will focus on updating and optimizing what I have added so far. Keep in mind that what I have provided to far is not all my doing.  Some of my work is credited to a man who once made sprites in LttP style and pretty much abandoned all of his Zelda and other game-related projects.  Upon his 'retirement', he game me, as well as many of the zelda fan game community, a plethera of assets.  His name is Antony A. Brown, also known as "aab".  The jabu jabu tileset in the absolute dungeon tileset is his work.  I once asked him to create a tileset for me using the layout for the Graal online engine, because I was once using it to make maps and then import them into another game engine.  He also created a unique monster for me because I asked him for it.  it is a monster that takes a nod from the trees in the dark World of LttP that spit bombs at you when you touch them.

They are the Treant.



Since I now have confirmation that the tileset is not the cause of the long load time, I am thinking about rearranging the Hyrule tileset to better organize the tyle types as I did in the absolute dungeon tileset.

Sometimes the quest editor takes a couple seconds to load the quest, but nothing I am overly concerned about.  The long load times are more pronounced when loading the game.  The Solarus logo loads instantly, but once it begins to transition to the game is when it takes a long time to load.

I have tested this on two different machines, one with much better specs than the other.  the XP machine had Skype running in the background, and both the XP machine as well as the 10 machine had antivirus and Steam running in the background; all at minimum performance (no more than 3% of the CPU per process on either machine, and no active windows open).

Even on the XP machine, with my browser open, using up more than 75% of the CPU (single processor), and at only 2 GB of ram, Solarus ran at moderately good performance.  I feel the issue is in 1.4.5 because 1.5 reduced the load time by a couple seconds, but overall still a low load time.  In the very beginning, keep in mind 90% of the work done has been done from the XP machine, Solarus loaded instantly when I used the PZE tileset, and the dimensions of that tileset were 256 x 11000+

The chest sprites can cleverly be put in tile.entities.png or in a separate file

The reason the chest tiles are included were not to be used as dynamic tiles that can be disabled upon start as placeholders for chests the editor may want to put down.  This was an idea taken from Tunics, in which parts of the tileset contained enemy sprites that were used as dynamic tiles, which were then replaced within the code by random enemies based on certain conditions like weapon/item requirement, tileset, terrain type, etc.

the current dimensions of the custom hyrule tileset are 992 x 1600.

The spacing was done to organize the tile types.  Honestly I wasn't paying attention to the spacing at the time, I was keeping the tiles together mostly to avoid users from losing track of tile type.

Sure

http://www10.zippyshare.com/v/I6BVo6R5/file.html

It's messy though.  I hope you don't mind xD

[I will replace the reduced image with a less compressed version so if anyone downloads this image to use in their projects PLEASE be sure to update it. I will edit the post accordingly to let everyone know it has been changed!]

yeah and because of my poor eyesight even I did not know this.  Chris pointed out that every color in the palette has a 32 number difference brightness between them.

Also, part of the reason I did not port the entire tileset was because, and it might just be on my side of theings, Solarus takes a long time (up to 30 seconds) to load a map for me.  I have three computers, each of them with a different OS on them for compatibility purposes.  One has Windows 7 Home premium, one has Windows 10 Free upgrade, and the other has WIndows XP SP3.  I have run Solarus on my Windows XP machine as well as the Windows 10 machine.  The Windows 10 machine cuts the load timee down by around 10-15 seconds, but the XP machine loads a bit longer, between 15-25.

I am working with the tileset that I uploaded here, but mine is less compressed than this one (which, if you look closely, some of the tiles have noise in them).  Without the compression, so far that png file is around 300 KB in size.  And in his recent stream he states that Solarus is designed to load maps and even tilesets of virtually any size.  However I noticed that when I used one of his tilesets, load times were instant, no longer than 3-5 seconds.  Loading one of mine brought the load time up significantly, even on small maps using the much bigger tilesets.

So, I tried to minimize the number of tiles as well as the overall file size to help load times.  This resulted in the image forcing it down to a 256 color png with alpha transparencies, which looks kinda terrible.

I will replace the reduced image with a less compressed version so if anyone downloads this image to use in their projects PLEASE be sure to update it.  I will edit the post accordingly to let everyone know it has been changed!

-EDIT- The image has been updated!

I plan to make a minimap tileset for building overworld and dungeon minimaps.  I also need to rework and recolor the tilesets I have already created, as well as create tutorials on how to install and use them.  Refer to the post I made on the Lakebed tileset for an idea on what the tutorials will look like