OOoooooh… I guess it optimized away the particle draw call since the back buffer was cleared the next frame anyway. OpenGL knowledge improved! =S
100 medals!!! I was actually at 99 until now, but I think it’s showing 101 now, right? I think Riven explained that to me some time ago… =S
Offtopic:
The forum allows you to give karma-points to others. When these are awarded to a ‘post’ they are turned into a medal. Any other karma point is simply a database operation like user.karma++. This explains part of the discrepancy. The other part is explained by when karma points were awarded for posts, when there weren’t medals yet.
Now get back to work!
This is all a ploy to make Riven more money. He is somehow using all this karma that we give each other to make his riches. He truly is an evil fluffy overlord.
Karma… isn’t this that, what Buddah’s have? You can have good and bad karma, and if you have an equal amount of good and bad karma, then you are gonna taken to nirvana? Maybe I remember wrong… I’ll take a look at wikipedia 
EDIT: Wikipedia says yeeees.
Going from what I learned when I was a Buddhist, there’s not so much “good” and “bad” karma as there’s just karma, which is the cosmic force driving the whole cycle of life and death. The goal isn’t about accumulating any type of karma, but escaping its influence altogether. So it’s not so much about cancelling out any one kind of karma as it is about making it irrelevant.
I can see the philosophical connection between karma and particles (small details flying around and driving the universe), but can we please try to stay on topic? :
My offer for making a transform feedback tutorial is still up…
Write it!!!
Am I allowed to be a bitch and say “Too late!” now? =S
Actually I’m going on a 2 day trip to a certain village, followed by returning home to Sweden next week, so I’ll be pretty busy with lots of things… We’ll see if I can get find some time on saturday though…
hmmm…although having 1mil+ particles is great I think I would rather 50k that look fantastic. From what my very limited understanding is, you want to have the best looking effect with the least amount of particles.
This is my current system that will be use in my game. It is in java2D so I think I’ll opt for a unbelievably pathetic 1000-1500 particles.
Once rewritten in opengl I will go for 10-20k. Got to leave room for everything else.
I also would like to see a tut.
Only in reality when you go to Shirakawa-go, the only scary thing will be the out of place gaijin in a small village :3
I was working on a game on top of ngCore (does a Javascript -> C++ -> JNI -> Java/Android translation or a JS -> C++ -> ObjC/iPhone ) and due to the limitations of the system, going over 50 particles at once was killing the FPS. 
I found this! http://volumetricshadows.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/fourier-opacity-mapping.pdf
I have no idea how it works, but it looks completely awesome. It doesn’t require any particle sorting when rendering the occlusion map, and it also supports prefiltering, which (if I got this right) should mean that we can also use mipmaps and anisotropic filtering. I can see myself using this for translucent stuff and exponential volumetric shadow maps for opaque stuff. Both can be filtered in hardware, so they shouldn’t suffer from aliasing even when viewed at step angles thanks to anisotropic filtering or when viewed from far away thanks to mipmaps.
EVSMs need 32-bit float textures, which I believe are supported on OGL 2 hardware through extensions, but I’m pretty sure that hardware filtering from such textures is not, which pretty much kills any advantage of having them. Those Fourier Opacity Maps work with 16-bit floats though and should be easily implemented even with only OGL 2.
Added to my to-implement list.