Particles

I'm having some trouble with particles. On one hand I'd like to keep them simple so I can re-use the assets between emitters. On the other hand jMonkey's built in particle system doesn't like dark particles.

I am happy with the effect I came up with for rockets, and I was able to re-do my old particle system to keep persistent trails around after the rocket entity dies. But I am not happy with the blend modes available to jme.

Jme has 9 different blend modes for it's particle material, and of those modes 6 are "additive" type modes, or modes which when combined make the color brighter. This makes sense for alot of particles, white smoke, clouds, fire and electricity all make things brighter. When you want things to get darker though, it gets more complicated.

So much of the effect gets blown out from the additive modes.

Alternatively I can use alpha blend, and color all the particle effects in an image editor. This results in some nice looking effects but it becomes much harder to re-use assets. Currently all of my particles are simple black and white textures which makes it easy to use the same effect for fire, smoke, fog, water, etc.

I think I am going to look into adding more blend modes myself over the next week or so.