NetOne cheers brother, I really appreciate the interest I put the whole project on stand-by for a couple of months, to get some perspective and curse the heavens and gather energies for what gonna be, I'm afraid, quite a deep redesign of the whole damn thing (again). That's a step I dont wanna take too lightly though, so Im considering how should i approach the whole thing from the beginning.
So this array solution seems to be the "proper" (even the "old school") thing to do, thus i really want to give it a try -- or a look, at least. The problem is, I'm not even sure of what you guys mean by "load-level-from-array"... you mean, load them tiles? Or load uh... coordinates of things? Enemy encounters, or what? I know i can export a tilemap to json (im not 100% sure what a json file is tho), but I dont think my tilemap is the problem (gots collisions off). Whatever. Any tutorial or article or blog entry on this technique? (not NetOne necessarily, but hey ;P )
About the "Tilemap Solution" discussed some posts above, I tried it (or something resembling it) in some little pacmanoid project i had which was giving me (yeah also) performance problems -- and it's working pretty good, although it requires a quite strict "checkboard" approach that i'm not sure is gonna work for the mighty MEGAQUEST...
Finally, I havent completely dropped the idea of splitting the whole thing into several layouts. Even faking some seamless-looking effect somehow. That would be somewhat safer, as these performance issues tend to appear when the game gets a certain size (and consequently a lot of work behind), i wouldn't like to discover then that whatever the path i choose happens to be useless again...