I might have to write up a tutorial for this. General gist is to grab a tileset with transparency(
http://forums.graalonline.com/forums...hp?t=134256126) and use that as a tileset. Gonstruct has some bugs with tilesets though, and it doesn't handle priorities too well, so you might have to disable the default tiledef(pics1). Careful though, as this can cause bugs when you open a new level sometimes that causes Gonstruct to crash.
Anyways. I love layers. They open a whole new dimension to level making, and can simplify tilesets a bunch... however, they can also be annoyingly complicated to work with. Objects like houses can usually take up more than one layer of tiles, causing you to navigate between all the layers to do something as simple as moving it over one tile. They're definitely more hassle to work with, even if they do make some things easier. Also, it's easy to get caught up in layers and take things to the extreme(as my levels show), just because it's so awesome to play with. However, Gonstruct itself is pretty simple overall compared to the default editor, even if it has made some advancements the default hasn't. It doesn't support gmaps, no playtest(which I use a lot), for example. The gmap thing is probably the biggest thing it's lacking. But before Gonstruct we didn't have ANYTHING that let us edit layers, forcing us to make separate layers in levels and copy/paste the data into text format and edit it all manually. It wasn't very fun. So even with Gonstruct's problems, I can now use layers on a semi-simplistic basis when I find the need to, without being burdened by the idea of doing it all manually.
And Vima, this thread should help you understand what layers are capable of:
http://forums.graalonline.com/forums...hp?t=134256104
With future additions to layers, we may be able to draw them over players, making the need for probably 90percent of NPC's useless.
In fact, if I sat down one day with pics1, I could probably come up with a lot of creative methods to save tilespace using layers. For example, the castle floor tiles uses various colored tilesets with different decorations. You have the plain color[1 tile], the diamond[4 tiles], the spotted[1 tile], the small diamond[1 tile]. That's 7 tiles for one color variation, so 14 when you add in blue, then 21 tiles when you add a yellow variation. However, with layers you can make a solid color single tile, and use a decoration tile with transparency to overlay the colors instead, like so:
All you'd have to do is add a single color tile to get all the variations you need at minimal tilespace cost. So instead of the 21 tiles for 3 colors, you'd only be taking up 9 tiles with layers. This is actually similar to what I did with shadows in my transparent pics1 tileset, and it actually reproduced nearly all the original shadow colors near-perfect to the naked eye over all the various terrains.