3D tile engine... any pitfalls?

Long story short, I'm working on a shmup engine that'll be entirely done in 3D (gameplay will of course be 2D -- think Einhander), and I know enough to make the game, but not enough to work on a cross-platform world editor of decent quality (I'm not experienced enough in GUI-specific things at the moment, I just never really touched the subject).

I'm thinking of having levels made in a way that you can edit them in a text format, constructed of "tiles" that are .MD2 models of widths that are multiples of 64 or something like that.  A sample level definition file might look something like:

activecolumn 5    ; column where action occurs (in this hypothetical example, all the road tiles are in this column), every other column is foreground and background

skybox images/storm.tga
music audio/level3.ogg

tiledef X [emptytile]
tiledef 0 tiles/road1.md2   ; 64x64
tiledef 1 tiles/road2.md2   ; 64x64
tiledef 2 tiles/terrain.md2 ; 128x128
tiledef 3 tiles/factory.md2 ; 128x128
tiledef 4 tiles/foreground1.md2  ; 512x128

mapdef
2 X 2 X 1 4 X
X X X X 1 X X
2 X 2 X 1 X X
X X X X 0 X X
2 X 2 X 0 X X
X X X X 0 X X
3 X 2 X 0 X X
X X X X 1 X X
end

...

From a programming standpoint this can save time on learning GUI programming just to make a world editor (and there's other things about custom level editors that I see complications  from, such as if I change something in a custom-made file format... I've self-imposed an artificial deadline on this project to get it done before December).  From a design standpoint, however, this can potentially make it a pain in the ass to model tiles in such a way that their geometry and textures would look seamless when placed next to each other in the game.  Perhaps I can write a Python script in Blender that can let me visualize tiles next to each other as I work on them, without affecting the ones I don't want to change?

Also I don't think modeling the whole level in Blender would work, because I don't know any free file formats that I could use, along with other technical concerns I have with limitations on textures (also I cannot model the entire level and export it as one big .MD2 file -- the format has a limitation of 4096 triangles per model).

>>8

OP here (>>7 was an impostor... although I agree lol).  Level generators, already made one when I worked on my roguelike before I put it on hold.  You could specify 3 kinds of environments: caves, palaces, and forests, and I had more "flavors" in mind.  Cave  generator would make dungeons similar to those seen in the original Final Fantasy games (think that dungeon in Final Fantasy 4 that ended with that sapient wall that tried to crush your party).  Forest generator was easy enough, even with occasionally making small rivers and streams for variation.  Palace generator made passable layouts about 50% of the time, and would even auto-space generated things like pillars and things supposed to be decorations, and randomly make symmetrical rooms since palaces tend to have those.

But even a below-average roguelike takes much longer to develop than an above-average space shooter, so I'm opting to cut my teeth on a space shooter first.  If I want to work with computer graphics systems, it's also a better start than a roguelike.