UglyMike, you are my own personal hero 
Now I just need to know, how do I use a “.patch” file? In all my work getting Blender itself to be a natural extension of myself (yeah, sounds creepy, I know), I have not yet gotten entirely into all the script, patch, CVS and build stuff.
Cognis, you can usually find precompiled versions at http://www.graphicall.org or http://www.blenderbuilds.com.
I have been flat out lately, so havent had a chance to muck around with blender, but today decided to test the latest particle patch from graphicall, and there is no effector type under the particle tab, only emitter and reactor!! The effectors are only under the fields window. So how would you make particles take the shape of one object, then change to the shape of another object now?
MicWit
The effector is in the Fields and Deflection tabs, look at the sample I made for french forum (the text inside is in french but the sample is easy to understand)
1°) You need an emitter, in the sample file the plane
2°) Some mesh container:
The text container need a particle system where the sta: parameter is to begin the attraction and the end: parameter to end the attraction. In fields and deflection panel, I enable Psys to enable fields for the particle system and not for the mesh and choose harmonic.
I made the same things for the 2 others objects…
3°) We don’t want to show on render the particle of the container so in the outliner I restrict the renderability of the 3 container.
That’s all you need to play with the harmonic.
Jahka, another big feature request…
smoke?
I know this is complicated, but I’ve seen that basically many smoke simulators are particle based. Boids already can simulate some little interaction between particles, so maybe through this a smoke simulation could be achieved…
Awesome, thanks for that Lguillaume, that makes sence.
Anyone else have a problem with the boids demo crashing blender as you try opening it? Im using the latest graphicall.org particles patch with blender 2.43, as well as CVS from graphicall.org, and each time I try open the basic_boids.blend, blender crashes.
You can’t open demo between release, Jahka made some change in the structure of the particle.
i’m having a small problem, think it might be a bug.
i have a plane emitting particles which are set to display as cubes. with random size,(which is great!)
now the problem is i want to convert these particles to a mesh. i hit the button in the modifer stack and nothing happens, but when i use ALT-C>Mesh the modifer disappears but the particle system is still in the particles system window. it no longer animates but its still just duplicates of the cube object. if i try to delete the particle system (in the particle system window, not the mesh) blender crashes.
anything im doing wrong?
A question for the new particle system,
Is it possible to create something that does the following:
If you have gras with a moving object on the grass, then let the gras be pressed to the ground and slowly come up again as the object moves over the gras. …?
That’d be softbodies.
Or you could do somehting clever with the Floor constraint (grass tips Floored to a plane on the bottom on the shoes, maybe)
Heheh, I don’t know if that would work with particles. 
Anyway, if the person has to walk over a large field of grass then floor constraints wouldn’t work, cause when he took one step the constraints would push down every single blade of grass in the field. Floor constraints also wouldn’t account for the ‘slow rising back up’ he was talking about.
Yeah, soft-body particles would work fine, just make them spaced out enough and you shouldn’t have any problems, that’s what the new ‘children’ interpolation is for, anyway. To turn turn ten soft-body particles into a few hundred.
Thanks BlackBoe! Sounds logical to me, softbodies ofcourse. Unfortunately…2.43 does have the new stuff yet, so I can maybe to a test somewhere in the future with the patch. First I’ll continue with my animation in the current 2.43.
I will use my “I was writing while tired” card to get out of that one 
I was thinking about a deflector, somehow my brain just switched to the Floor constraint instead.
I’m not finding a way to do a texture emition.
Any tips?
Giba
Small noob question - when I render, my particles are nowhere near my emitter (the cube being the emitter, I figured out how to switch on it’s visibility):
Why is this?
I have no idea, there’s any number of reasons. Could I see the .blend?
i have downloaded the file and i get a file called called 7z file. what do you do with this file?
Oh, you just need to bake it, is all. :]