Pumo had reminded me of a wish he had issued weeks or rather months ago, and which I had totally forgotten: Snow and rain effects for D2X-XL. After fiddling around with the particle system a bit I tried the snow texture he had sent me - and had to smile. Pumo, living in Mexico, has never seen falling snow; so, since he knew that ice forms those nice hexagonal crystals, had sent me a texture containing such a crystal. He had no idea that (usually) snow flakes are formed by dozens or even hundreds of small ice cristals lumped together, giving them an irregular, amorphous shape. Fortunately my "simple smoke" texture fitted this bill nicely with its fuzzy borders and slightly structured texture, so I was able to create some pretty nice snow effect with it.

The movie clip was made in Yokelassence's mission Dimensional Intersect, which I have modified to show off the new feature - originally that area had animated "snow" textures similar to the old style fuel center sparks.

It looks quite realistic in-game when moving, since the particle system creates differently sized "snow flakes" that travel with different speeds in slightly different directions, making it look like it's swirling in the wind.

Rain was a bit harder (not really though), as it consists of elongated water strips that always had to point to the same direction regardless of the orientation of the player ship. I managed to implement that too, and added a nice splattering rain sound effect to D2X-XL for it (there's no sound effect for the falling snow though //PrintArticle (parent.frames ["worklog-text"].document