Particle illusion wouldn’t do you much good for generating in game effects. It’s designed for rendering out particle effects in 2D. It is kind of nice for visualizing effects, though.
Here’s my remedial description of in game effects:
The effects in most games are sprite based. They rely on a particle system editor to generate a file (could be binary, could be text) that the game uses to recreate the effect in the engine. Most of the time you will start out with a 32 bit image created in a 2d package like Photoshop. The image should have an alpha channel that allows your sprite to have transparent edges and can represent many different things, like snowflakes, clouds, bits of fire, water spray, stars, etc. If you can model better than you can draw, you could build an object in a 3d package and render out an image that you could use as a sprite.
Some particle engines will allow you to feed in a series of these images and play them back sequentially as an animation mapped to your sprite. And some use a sprite page, like you mentioned, with each frame of the animation mapped to a portion of the texture map.
A sprite is really just a quad polygon that is mapped with an image that always faces the camera.
The spell type effects you are talking about from Warcraft are usually a combination of particle effects and animated geometry. Stuff like this:
http://www.blizzard.com/war3/screenshots/ss016-large.shtml
That effect in the center is just a couple of (warped) open ended cylinders with a transparent texture, and a glow effect added in game. It might also have alpha and color values applied to the vertices. This would allow you to use the same texture on each of the different cylinders, yet give them different colors. It would also allow you to fade them out at the top so you don’t end up with a hard edge. You can also animate the UV coordinates (or UV offset) on your object’s textures to get scrolling texture effects. But again, all of this is dependant on what your game engine supports. Some engines support glowing textures, some don’t. Some support scrolling textures, some don’t.
First thing you need to do is find out it there is any kind of documentation on what kind of effects are built into your game. Find out if there’s a particle editor.
If you're playing around with the Unreal engine there is a ton of documentation out there:
[http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/ParticleSystems](http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/ParticleSystems)
Here's a particle editor for use with the Torque game engine:
[http://www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=2472](http://www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=2472)
[http://torque.feylab.com/downloads/ParticleEditor.zip](http://torque.feylab.com/downloads/ParticleEditor.zip)
Here's a forum post on editing particle effects in Doom 3:
[http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=3333](http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=3333)
Here's a forum link to a particle editor for the Ogre engine:
[http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=42694](http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=42694)
Talk to your programmers! They will guide you.
Otherwise, you may just have to look at these other engines and hopefully get some similar tools made for you to do the job.
~M
I will try to make some 2d frames and see how it goes.
