A rather late explanation...
The smoke illustrated is of the "smoketrail" type. It is constructed as a series of straight-line segments which are long, rectangular, 2-D textures strung together, much like a banner. When seen from end on, you are looking at what is essentially a thin slice, and get the odd appearance seen here.
The "smokeparticles" type has a bunch of (usually) square textures making a series of smaller individual cloudless of smoke. These particles are *always* drawn as directly facing the observer, and therefore are never seen as edge-on slices.
The smoketrail type of effect is usually assigned to the effects having in their name "TSPD", which are meant as "trail" types generated when at flying speed.
The smokeparticles type of effect is usually assigned to effects having in the name "SPD".
One could alter the .eff file to use either of the trail or particle type of effect generation. For instance, EngineHeavyTSPD.eff could use the particle type instead of the stock trail type, if you so desired. Then both it and EngineHeavySPD.eff would use the particle type of effect.
I like to retain the original effect type assignment. In this way I have the particles for better realism, but which cannot be generated for longer than about 6.5 seconds. The trail type can be made to last rather longer, due to the smaller number of individual elements required. This extends the smoke trail with a more diffuse, blended appearance, as would occur after the smoke turbulently mixes after some interval of time.
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Topic: Improving rendering of smoke trails (Read 2032 times)
