You can make your smoke out of sprites too: voila! no more sorting errors.

Particles do not appear in front of models -- just sprites. I haven't tested other kinds of entities.

I guess you probably know this but I found that it is pretty easy to replace particle effects with sprite effects: you call "ent_create" for each sprite you want to make and use a slightly modified version of the existing particle function. One big difference is the need to move the objects yourself: you don't have vel_x,vel_y,vel_z -- so I use internal skill variables to store the velocity and use ent_move or just say:
Code:

---

vec_set(temp,my.Skill51);

vec_scale(temp,time);

vec_add(my.pos,temp);

---

The level looks great!