Particle Systems

I have added a particle system to D2X-XL that works pretty well from the mechanical side. You can enable smoke on player ships and robots, and the worse a ship/bot is damaged, the stronger it will smoke. It doesn't look perfect, but it's a start. I am having some issues with the alpha handling of the texture used for the particles, and I wonder whether there would be more elegant ways to do this using e.g. shader programs. If someone knows more about this: Hints and help are welcome.