With al respect to Lee and every one working on Max.
Up to no you guys have exceeded all expectations with max on everything you have done up to now
and i know its not easy and i thank you guys from the bottom of my heart, But......


Please just pause on this for a moment before you guys carry on with other stuff.
Please , Please , is it not possible to at least try and make a decal flame that is not using the normal flat decal but instead allow the use of different model shapes such as a model that is round or cylindrical or even like a pyramid where the flame is still moving on the entire shape such as the flat model, that way we would be able to create fires that look nice and don't have to resort to having to place a lot of flat ones just to get a subpar flame when it would look better with different shapes of flames, because most engines these days have a lot more 3d flames and gameguru/max does not have that, by making use of this we will at least have a little better fire that we can use.

Sorry if i am out of line. but after all that's been done so far the flame decal or flame model or what every we use now do not fit in to the standard of what has been done so far in max.

Decals by definition are 2D.

To make a 3D fire you can either use particles with a special shader to depth blend them to a more fire-like effect or I suppose you could make an animated 3D fire model but to be realistic it would have to have thousands of frames and probably tens of thousands of vertices.

In theory the TGC particle generator can make realistic flames, whether MAX has the requisite shaders to make them look realistic in 3D though, that is the question we should be asking.

Btw if you look down on a real fire you don't see flames! So you really need several different effects, further away decals (possibly several different ones for different viewing angles), closer in particles and up close a combination of *glowing* textures and particles (as long as you have the appropriate shaders that is).

Different shapes, like a cylinder or pyramid would not help as they would look even worse than flat planes at different angles and would require some fancy sort of adaptive texture wrapping that takes account of the players viewing angle relative to the object, with flat planes they are simply rotated to face the camera which doesn't require any fancy mapping and look fine until you get up close or try to view them from an angle that the decal wasn't designed for.

Camp fire in Classic with particles

What I really like about decals are the fx shaders.
The fx shaders come in handy in very different situations, ie. I can texture my mesh with a video texture.
So, I think the best move is to forget the old GG decals, and look at the FX shaders, and the great help it is in the game.

I plan to combine particles with decals when needed, but mostly 3d particles, even to make fire effects.
As Amen said, a real campfire just thrown some flames when starting, then becomes like embers, most than big flames.
@ TGC, just back the FX shaders, and we will go the rest.
GGMax shaders are non-friendly editable, so FX, please.

Plain decals is good and dandy, but personally is going to look out of place in the wicked rendering pipeline without adding some rendering magic to it.So rather not have it at all if it isn't done perfectly.

@3com. I think TGC are stuck with whatever Wicked Engine uses shader wise. I don't think they changed from fx for fun, probably more required in the engine or possibly, just a faster way to go.

@ DVader
Giving support to the GG animated decal system would be the faster way to go, though, otherwise means handling animated decals via CSO shaders, hard to do so, imho.