1. There doesn't seem to be any way to make glows scale or scale over time. Am I correct? Seems like that'd be an easy thing to put into the engine and it'd be useful.

2. There doesn't seem to be any way to make RGB shift over time, just pixel gray values. Did I miss something? This is pretty important for certain types of effects to look right, like fire.

3. Glows seem to ignore rotation- Lua can send a rotate to the MOPixel but the graphic won't rotate. Am I just doing it wrong? I want to do translucent effects that are Attachments.

4. All glows apparently use additive blending; it'd be nice to also have straightforward alpha blending for things like smoke. Engine-side, pretty easy change unless all the particles are batched, and it just needs a logical state in the INI.

Any help on this issue would be very appreciated; I wanted to tackle making a really decent flamethrower and those three things are pretty major stumbling blocks, so I wanted to know if I'm just stupid or if there are reasonable workarounds via Lua.

1. Correct, not in any easy way. Glows are pretty much hardcoded to be of fixed size (it's possible to make an imperfect simulation via glow strength escalation, but yeah), so if you want a true scaling glow, you'll have to make multiple bitmaps and spawn them in sequence

2. Not that i know of. Again, potentially possible via brute force animation (i.e. multiple pixels of varying shade in sequence via Lua), but there's no elegant way of doing it that i know of. The Lua solution i'm thinking of is maybe like, have a chain of MOPixels that change into the next link (with identical properties) after a certain amount of time. Possible, but not optimal.

3. Yes, they ignore rotation. Once again, multiple bitmaps are your best bet here. I believe Mehman had something that used that technique somewhere; i think it was Lagless Laser or something. Same principle can be applied for eventual transparent attachables.

4. wot (i'm not well versed in colours, leaving this one to someone else)

Yeah, I thought about doing the manual-switch thing.

It sure seems like an overly-complex way to go about it, though; particle effects are just quads and could be scaled easily in the engine. Same with RGB shifts over time; it's pretty trivial to code it, but without the engine source, I can't even offer up a patch.

Anyhow, I may find time to do this the hard way when I'm done with the more important stuff.