Frenchy,
Particle smoke means that it is not made up of two, 2d textures which are perpendicular to each other. If you were to fire off a rocket, or follow a smoking plane in the old version, and you lined right up on the smoke, the smoke would look like this --> +
Particle smoke is a 3d object (actually a bunch of tiny objects - particles) and will look like smoke no matter from which angle it is veiwed. IIRC, that is the way the smoke was in AW3.
For those of you in the game now, can the color of the smoke be changed? I'm thinking that if the smoke were forced to white and some code was added to turn it on above a certain altitude, we'd have contrails.
