Border Tiles, You know, black for stairs, grass for...

Lots of you probably don't know or remember me, but the few that do probably know that I'll come on D_W once a year or so and spend a few days making some really great stuff, usually making a lot of custom tiles along the way. Thankfully, last time the GMs gave me town permission and I was able to make some neat stuff, but something has always bugged me about the way building works.

Last time I built (and likely the time before that), I wanted to make some neat snowy regions. However, the border around towns is green grass. Every time a player is near the edge of town, it kills the illusion because they see green grass instead of snow. With stairs, it's just as bad. The border is completely black and you can see the border from a large portion of the stairs. It takes quite a bit of effort to keep players from seeing this, and doing so often effectively reduces the size of the map because I have to keep players half a screen away from the edge.

I dunno if Byond can work like this easily, but is there a way of having the border tiles call up a specific tile (including custom tiles) on the user's end? The same way that stepping on a music tile changes the music for the player, stepping on a "border-changer tile" would change all the border tiles to a specified tile. For instance, let's say there is a beach town. When you enter the town, you're placed on a "border-changer tile" that calls up all border tiles to be sand. Then from where you are, everything looks normal. However when you go to the edge of the water, the town has been designed in such a way that you step on another "border-changer tile" and the borders all change to water, so when you're at the other edge of the map, everything still looks normal.

Of course, combo tiles would be needed: AKA "border-changer/music tile."

Also it'd be great to have a verb to grant players the ability to link two tiles, for example to extend maps (large towns, etc.), have a branching path (mazes), etc.. And this might need to be comboed with the previous tiles, as well.

Hello, sorry I didn't post sooner, but people rarely use the forums these days, kinda sad. Anyways, I like that idea, however, I see a number of problems with it.

1. The first problem is the most difficult, about 9 towns are on One Z level each and are also close to each other so it saves space. If 2 people made towns, they'd be next to each other. The first town's border tiles would be overlapped by the second towns border tiles, which is a problem if the tiles aren't the same.

Answer: Fixing this would be easy, somewhat, however there are a number of solutions.

A. The easiest way to fix it would be to put the towns farther away from each other, then there wouldn't be a problem with overlapping tiles. This would require more space, and would decrease the amount of towns that could be used.

B. Another way is to put specific border types on different Z levels. This would cause a lack of variety however, and some other problems.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2. The Border Tiles themselves are another problem, the only solution I see is placing custom icons over them, but as soon as you go on them, you are teleported outside of town. A way to fix this is to have a command that allows you to not be effected by your towns "exit/entrance" tiles, but spammers would abuse this and edit other towns tiles.

Answer: A way to fix this would be a sort of barrier like staircases have, but that, along with the first problem's first answer, would eat up space.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Not many other problems I see in the idea, but then, I was looking at the major issues. Anyways, seeya around.