I finally tried out Ray Game Designer 2 from the "tools" page, here on Glorious Trainwrecks.

Oh my gosh it was something I've been looking for for a long long time. Cheap tile-based 3D with triggers, switches, scriptable events, and it plays AVIs and any sound or music files. The map editor even has a "randomly fill" and "randomly deform" macro built in. How could I have missed this before?

My problems are, firstly, that any 3D tiles I try to place from my tile bank don't show up in the editor. It says I put that tile there, and if I leave and return to the space, it says that tile is there, and the textured cube shows up correctly in the little preview window in the very same editor, but it simply is invisible to the main window.

Secondly, all the documentation online about the software is in French, and not particularly google-translatable.

I really, really, really want to make something in this, but I'm at a loss as to how to get started here. If anybody here has any experience with the program, I'd really appreciate any pointers you have on getting this amazingly over-looked little program to behave.