Since I started playing the game in 2016, the particle effects from dust and smoke have stayed pretty much the same. They don't collide with objects and have pretty much no variation other than size and color. They phase through everything, vehicles and ground alike. I feel like BeamNG could use an improvement in the system, potentially even using GPU acceleration like OpenCL particle effects. I realize that would mean a lot of work for very little tangible gain, but dust kicked up from vehicles being shaped by the wind or pushed around from the draft of other vehicles racing behind could add a lot of subtle realism where there isn't much already. Pretty much every GPU in use supports OpenCL in one form or another, so it's not as if hardware support isn't there, even if weaker CPUs are still in common use. Even Intel HD 600 iGPUs support OpenCL. It doesn't even have to be the default system, potentially an option for "high quality smoke" or some such could exist in the video menu, and the low quality one being fewer particles or simply the current ones we have now. I also know some folks wanted PhysX or FleX particle systems added to BeamNG, but I don't think it would be a good move as only some people will be able to use it without using CPU time.
Yea the official particles are seriously lacking, i really hope they can improve it. That being said, the new water particles look really good, so they could still possibly use the "old" system but with a nicer animation.
Honestly I think the water particles are fine. Not great, but they look okay for the few moments you have to look at them. They convey what they need to, and the splashing effect looks good enough to express you driving into and through a body of water. The dust effects not so much, and you can easily tell that things like exhaust smoke are being faked. Fluid particle simulation would be the best solution for simulating bodies of water, but lots of people have weak systems that may not be agreeable with 10,000-20,000 particles being simulated on a GPU or CPU.
