[Crow]

You can check out the "object" class in my Atlantis dump for something like this. I switch out tiles both on the serverside and clientside there to get a smoother experience. It's a bit more restrictive (bushes/stones/... sitting on top of the tiles) and therefore easier to control than your shovel stuff, though, but maybe it'll give you a few ideas. One thing to keep in mind: when using updateboard(), update a region larger than 2 by 2, no matter how many tiles you actually changed. Stefan added some "optimization" to the server at some point that can really **** up your tile handling when you're updating a 2 by 2 region.