and I just figured out what was causeing that crash I was mentioning, if a decal should ever fail to create (and it happens due to the culling mechanism being too agressive (need to work on that)) the bit that gets a new decal redy to be made from a model forgets to mantion to the rendering code that it's been changed, and thus it's vertex buffer never gets updated with the new geometry, and when the burn pass trys to access the verts in the vertex buffer for the last decal it's over shooting the vertex buffer, and this is very very _very_ bad.
I also reorganised the whole system (again) it's a lot more modular now, wich enabled me to get decals to work on submodels. the only thing is they won't work on turret barrels, but I might have a way to fix that, but it's extreemly low on the priorities.
nex build I post (or posably the last one I posted) also has an implementation of point sprites, RT was working on this, but the particle system is so unbeleaveably slow I had to do something (don't mean to step on toes RT) I made a thing that will render out a bunch of pointsprites quite speedaly and integrated it into the particle system, also integrated it into the bitmap drawing function so that is why thrusters and stuff are not going to look as good, just bare with it it'll get better, I'm going to try and get a build posted before I go to sleep, but if I can't get it decently stable before I pass out, it won't happen.