Only found one reference in the forums to particles. And that post is a year old. Where do particles rank on the feature list? Top 3rd? Middle? Bottom 3rd?

Hi Decoverse

Not in the next couple of builds, but on the current list.
A new decal system should be in place in the next few weeks. Particles will be an extension to that, once we're sure it's stable.

Also I did notice that the particles render behind grass, if a smoke cloud is emitting even the distant grass shows as in front of the particles.. Is this a known glitch?

probably a setting with transparency. try 2 or 5 and see if the renders better.

This is something that needs to change, especially if GG is going to be as easy to use as the stated goal. In other engines, you can place transparent objects, particles, grass, etc without having to adjust any type of transparency value. The engine sorts and renders properly in all cases. I know that last time I used GG/FPSCR extensively, there were lots of quirks with this and some cases that just flat out didn't work. So, anything that can be done to make this "transparent" to the user would be nice.

Happy for ideas how we can expose transparency control to the end user. Normally we leave this up to the artist inside the FPE so the end user can focus on adding entities and getting an instant visual result. For example artists will set the glass of an entity to transparency mode 6 so the end user does not have to manually specify all glass in their scene and set it to 'render last'.

Well, the problem is that you have so many transparency modes. In an engine like Unity, for example, you set the material of the object to use a transparent shader. If it's transparent then it's transparent by virtue of the shader and thus should be sorted for rendering differently than something that is opaque. Something is either transparent or not. Even with all the different transparent modes, it was impossible for me to get my campfire shader efffect to work properly unless it happened to be applied to an entity that was a lower entity number than the other objects in the scene, and then only if the transparent mode was set to a specific value. That's just not right. If I told the engine it was transparent, it should have sorted and rendered it properly. Simple as that.