Spring RTS Engine

Since the particle system is still very limited I'd like to put some suggestions out there:

- Animated sprites aren't possible yet AFAIK, the idea would be just to play a number of frames with a user-defined delay in between. Many games use a few animated sprites as the center of their explosions and particles only as decoration. BTW, is there a way to make a CSimpleParticleSystem use the bitmap's colors?
- Rotation for the particles since it looks better if they're not always facing the same way and some spinning may be appropriate for some particles. Basically it should have rotation, rotationspread, rotationspeed and rotationspeedspread.
- Tracer particles that would emit a trail like missiles do with a user defined texture. I think so far there are only very limited ones available that are used in the default animation.
- Particle emitting particles that spawn a list of particles on different intervals for each would be useful for e.g. sparking particles or letting the target area burn a bit.
- Projectiles emitted by particle systems would allow for all this secondary-explosion stuff, use a weapon name for these to extract all the necessary properties from there with the launch angle and stuff defined in the particle system.
- Stretching along the velocity vector would be useful for simulating motion blur, would obviously only work with particles that are already oriented along their velocity vector (forgot what that tag was called).

BTW, is there a way to make a CSimpleParticleSystem use the bitmap's colors?

Yes. Set the RGB values to 1.0. The RGB values are all just offsets.

As for the rest... particles that could be arbitrarily spun would be nice.

Animated sprites that at least met the same specifications in terms of control as HeatCloud is a very big wish of mine- it'd make doing certain types of simulation a lot less CPU-intensive and allow for prettier FX in general, although given the way that the TextureAtlas is set up, we'd soon run out've space.

A "tracer" particle object that could be given all of the parameters of a CSimpleParticleSystem particle, but spawn another particle with inherited properties (for speed's sake, probably HeatClouds would be best, but I'd leave that up to users) and could inherit things from the parent, like vector and speed, would be veeeeeeeeery nice, because it'd allow for uber-fancy chunky explosions. However, one would immediately run into problems of CPU usage, I suspect, unless it was written in a very fast way. The default CSmokeTrail is kind've lousy, and I really hate how it's invoked by dying flying things without any input from the game designer- it's OK for OTA mods, but it sucks for anything where I'd like to get a lot more fancy.