Zdoom : Particles

Particles are cool. But I noticed so far that the only way I can use them in decorate is with ROCKETTRAIL or GRENADETRAL... Can I use them in a more flexible way? (like changing color, momentum, direction, fadeout, etc...) Or is it all hard-coded?

Bishop said:

Can I use them in a more flexible way?

You can't, I'm afraid. However, there is some customizability you can get from using A_RailAttack or A_CustomRailAttack for particles. Of course, these are used for rail attacks, and they're not particle-altering code pointers.

Those particles are just really tiny sprites (about the size of a single pixel) that are coded to spawn after rockets and grenades. You could put in new, similar sprites and then use A_SpawnItemEx or something to spawn them that way.

^That's what I tried doing for one of my projects. But then I ended up doing this:

ACTOR WhiteDust : WhiteParticleFountain
{
States
{
Spawn:
TNT1 A 5
Stop
}
}
...and using SpawnItemEx to use it whenever I needed.

Using 1x1, single colored sprites actually did the trick. I can do whatever I want with them. Plus, I can spawn as many as I want and not cause a any FPS drop. Gzdoom didn't even seem to break a sweat, unlike hi-res RGB sprites.

There is a catch, Theese sprites will always stay square and not be effected by gzdoom's particle style option.

And something else I did notice, Zdoom's particles seem to have the same scale no matter how far away you are from them whereas regular sprites scale smaller according to distance of course.

So, For anyone who might wan't to pull this trick, It's not really the same thing but it works. It works very well.