Like hundreds of other programmers I''m trying to make a game! I''s a sidescroller where two players (one Heli and one tank) should fight their way through nice levels with a lot of enemies! At the moment I''m working on the level design! But I don''t want to use the tiles of the same size! So not the normal tile-based-stuff (too unflexibel)! I want to include parallax scrolling with at least 5 layers! There has to be a ground (where the tank can drive). There should be hills, where the tank can jump , water, lava, ..... So if someone has made something similar I would be very glad for some advices, how to handle all that stuff! So long and thanks for all the fish! Bunnz

Sounds like Silkworm, if I remember correctly.
Anyway, why so worried about tile-based systems? Your screen is merely a tilebased system, with tiles 1x1 pixels wide... if you make your tiles small enough, you can have a fair bit of versatility. Remember you can build a larger structure out of numerous small tiles if you need. Personally, I can''t think of any other way of doing it except having one huge bitmap in memory and streaming it in as you play (and having to have some way of deducing terrain features from it).