Hi Kyle!
This is quite a refreshing topic and I’m really glad to see so much energy, thought, and reflection on P2D popping up all of a sudden.
I am indeed still working on the NetMission game engine. It has come a long way since that Defend Your Flaahgra demo (which is still hosted here if you’re interested in playing it!). Lately I gave my engine to some trusted close friends of mine to see if they can build a game with it, which has been incredibly useful for discovering all the usability issues and prioritizing what to work on next.
I’m definitely a few months overdue for another progress report (there are new things to share!) but the topic for my engine is sort of hijacked into the “Metroid: Net Mission” topic since, long story short, the goal is primarily to make that fangame, as well as tons of other games, including P2D if there’s really no better option by then. Here’s an update from last year.
And speaking of that update…
This concept sounds a lot like the Tiled Map Editor which is free and already being used to build the worlds of some great games out there (like Shovel Knight). Or if you want a setup that is customized specifically for P2D, it sounds a lot like Tallon IV Navigator (TIVNav) and its editor.
I threw this together back in August 2007, and the 2nd version of the navigator was even going to include a working Samus so that we could get a feel for things like jump height which directly impacts the level design. The idea was that team members could then work on individual rooms on their own, putting their assets into them, and then post new versions of these maps here, where other members could collect them all and watch as the rooms stitch together in their navigator. Sound familiar? 
I don’t mean to criticize your efforts here because I’m actually delighted by what you have to say right now and definitely I hope we can stir up some more activity. I just want to help direct the energy to more effective endeavors, based on past experience. TIVNav didn’t catch on. It’s difficult to post files on here or keep track of which versions are the newest. Plus developing maps in isolation is difficult when so many factors matter (Samus jump height, latest tile set versions, etc.). Nobody wants to put time into something when there’s a good chance their work will have to be completely redone each time some external factor changes. So I just want to save you the time of making and maintaining your own editor – Tiled Map Editor is a very worthy tool that already exists, and it’s pretty easy to make large changes in it with its features like custom brushes and whatnot (which would take quite some time to program in an adhoc editor for P2D).
One other thing – I have a massive collection of all of P2D’s resources that I could get ahold of over the years, most of which are well documented (author, timestamp, comments, etc.), and backed up in multiple places around the US. I’m not necessarily a fan of scrapping everything if we’re gonna have another fresh go at making this P2D beast, because there are some real treasures from the past that would be a waste to throw out. I’ve gotta get to bed soon or I’d dig up some Samus sheets for you – maybe I can get back here this weekend.
Anyway, I still think about P2D a lot (perhaps sometimes a bit too obsessively for my own good) and actually what brought me here tonight were similar thoughts to yours: we need a medium for team members to build stuff together, rather than relying on specific people as bottlenecks or single points of failure. I was just doing some web research trying to find if there are any decent collaborative project services that meet some requirements for us: private (for team members to view only, so this rules out most Wiki hosts), secure (can trust that the service will still exist in 10 years, provides an easy backup download, etc.), allows image/file hosting (much more than 50MB), and free (which is the killer).
A few years ago I actually brainstormed up a site that would be great for us and spoke about it with my brother (a professional web app whiz), so I was going to reach out to him soon. He’s a busy guy but maybe with some persuading he would whip something together for us. Basically just an organized Wiki tree of all our resources, which people could add to, with a newsfeed of changes, and so on. The first thing I’d want to do of course is import the entire collection I have of P2D stuff, so that everyone on the team could see the full rich history of what this project went through, here and back on those three iterations of SCU. Plus, manually updating the sprite list and documenting/archiving new resources all the time was such a pain, haha, so I’d really want to see that automated in some kind of web app.
More people out there than we think still want to play P2D someday. The idea is fantastic and immediately triggers one’s imagination of what it could be like, and every so often a new spark of activity shows up here and people do something crazy awesome, like design a new Samus for a week, or try to put together a Frigate demo in three months, or just make some more obscure environment graphics for fun. Old folks from the past who seem like they’ve forgotten the place still for some reason seem to hop over and make a post here maybe once a year, and we’re still sitting on a secret giant resource dump that could in theory be used to construct most of Tallon IV, even if most of it could use some touch-ups. I think if we had had some easy place for people to see exactly what’s missing and finished, upload their sprite experiments or map files, keep track of different versions of things as they’re modified by different people, etc., that didn’t need constant oversight by administrators, then the ball would have stayed rolling on its own, as fresh eyes could come in any time and actually contribute something right away.
Anyway, as a fellow 23-year-old Wisconsinite programmer, I welcome you to the boards and hope you can help us get the ball rolling again. 