This is our particle system. There are a huge amount of things to play with here, and many of them are similar properties to most particle generators, so forgive me if I leave out the stranger aspects of it… feel free to play!

OK, so there's a start and end version of the tinting colour, alpha value and size. Simple enough.

"Allow Colour Tinting" will tint the particles to match the ambient colour of the scene.

If the "Lock Y Axis Anim to X-Axis" is unchecked, it opens the Y-Size value scale boxes.

"Random Start Frame" pertains to contact sheet frame count (from 0 to (num-1))

"Loop Single Particle" is for the single particle update style.

"Render Order" is a way of stacking the particles in terms of how they render so that alpha problems are resolved.

"FPS" is the speed of playback on a contact sheet animation.

"Birth Rate" is per second

"Birth Rate in Particles/m" is for trailing streams like arrows and other trajectory items

"Life Expectancy" is in seconds

"Splat On Collision" is to make a splat on a surface using the same particle

"Detonate" (animate-able, 1 or 0 for on or off) is for an explosion-type emitter.

Most of the next few are obvious….

"X-Size" and "Y-Size" are for the width and length of the emitter itself, for a planer emitter.

"Bouncing Particles" do just that, against any static walkmesh.

"Particle Inheritance" offers the parameters for linking and velocity.

"Lightning Parameters" offers just that. You can adjust the random forward or backward position of a point on the lightning through the AMSF number- Aligned Movement Scaling Factor.

"Point to Point" accomplishes a number of things, but is good for gravity effects.

Then you can choose your "Update Style"…

And your "Render Style" (and some of the options because of that)

Then your "Blend Mode"

Then you choose your texture to use. Please note that emitter textures do not get exported when you export a scene or get textures. You must place them in your override yourself for you to see them. If it is a contact sheet animation texture you can define how many rows and columns it has.

And finally, if you want to use a model instead of a texture, you can, by putting the model name here (you do not need the suffix of .mdl). If you want that model to play an animation, have the model have an animation called "default". It makes for some fun things you can do, as an emitter can actually reference another emitter if you do it correctly.