Best rain effect I''ve ever seen was in NFS III: Hot Pursuit. That rain was done perfectly IMHO. The sound, the look, you haven''t seen rain in a game till you''ve seen this. Flawless. I''ve no idea how it was done tho. But nice framerates even on old hardware. (geforce SDR, celeron 366)

IMHO Metal Gear Solid 2 on PS2 has the most solid (pun intended)engine out there (built with the PS2 Emotion Engine eh). it features everything you wanna have (search some pics on google)

every games on PS2 have nice particles... they are exactly all the same though.. just stare 10 minutes infront of the screen watching those particles and you''ll understand how it is done

using ''models'' as particles is usefull depending on what you''re trying to do. i use it for ''chunks'' created when you blow up things in the environment (bottles, rocks, etc). particles can be a single tri/quad or have complex geometry, it''s up to you, but don''t overuse it.

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I''ve heard of some very nice water effects on some console games, but don''t play them.

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i think you''re talking about simple shaders, warping, reflections, etc, all that can be done on computers too (especially with the new geforce/radeon/etc). if the card doesn''t support motion bluring, you still can simulate it but the frame rate would drop in most cases. that''s why developing fast algorithm is pretty important.