Wow, hard to believe that what felt like a negative yesterday may turn into a positive. I just discovered a neat advantage to creating particles this way. I had some fire particles already working, so I added an action and function for smoke.

Get this, when the smoke particles (since bright is not on) travel into the shaded area of the building, they are shadowed also, so my grey smoke turns dark grey, but just the ones that should You couldn't get this with particles, AFAIK.

I have a nice plume of fire and smoke operating right now with less than 50 sprite entities total.

Regards, Ron

That's great!

Any chance of showing us a screenshot and maybe how you coded the effect.
Your screens are very impressive, if your system solves this problem it seems to me to be a better method than using particles.
Just one thing, the 33*33 sprite size sounds a little big.

I'm away from my house today and my PC but will post an image tomorrow. The custom particles are indistinguishable from the native particles, as you will probably see. I seem to have more control.

The orignal .tga's that I was using for the native particle effects were 128x128. I have reduced them considerably to 32x32, but kept them at 32 bit.

I'll post tomorrow.

Regards, Ron

Here's a new image. These particles are the sprite-type that I built. This is a different angle, but you cannot tell any difference between these and the built-in particles. Notice, though, how the sorting problem is gone. When I get my code into a more finished state, I will post it. Right now, all the particle movement routines are hard-coded in the function and I want to make it adjustable via WED properties and flags. These effects really look cool when you see them in motion.
Thanks, Ron

Hey Ron, looks like you really cracked this problem. One more thing - how did you get those great looking windows. Gives the image so much realism.
Regards, PeterC

PeterC,

Thanks. I use textures from TextureMonk
Regards, Ron