Since on some occasions, Lee has told me to suggest how this or that should be, in the streams, I am going to try to explain the benefits of a good FX shader system.

I know that GGMax does not support FX shadows, since wicked does not either, but I suppose Lee is thinking of an alternative system, however it would be nice if this system is not too basic; animating only cartoon-ish decals is fine for GG but not for GGMax, at least you are making a cartoon game, of course.
in GGmax if we decide to make a waterfall, it should be volumetric and with a seamless animation, and a good way to get your sprite sheet texture to work 100%, and that the waterfall is credible.

You can try to achieve this by combining the two systems, an animated decal, and a particle, but for this to work, you will need a shader system. In this way we will be able to achieve:

Foam



Waterfall - @ Graphycs : Thanks mate, great work here!!!



Rivers at the level of the mountain tops



And I am sure that users will also have many other ways to use this feature.

If it is going to work with a shader system developed via VS, so, maybe a name convention for the texture sheet might help, i.e.

"881foam.dds"
cols = 8
Rows = 8
mode = 1 (scrolling)
name = foam.dds

That info can help the GGmax code to know what kind of effect it should run, to run the decal animation. It may work as the params the shader system needs, to work with.
AGK particle editor does, and it works fine.