I will get down on my knees kiss your feet if ANYONE can show me how to create a simple object (Sphere, Quad , etc) and have it give off some simple particle effect (smoke trails?) while its moving.
I have ripped apart EVERY example there is, but every time I have tried to incorporate it into my app, nothing happens.
I gave up on Java3D for jME specifically for the nifty particle system, but I am clearly just too stupid to use it.
Please help me
It’s not a complete example (although you can dig around the code to put one together if you want) but net.java.dev.aircarrier.scene.SmokerFactory (code at http://aircarrier.dev.java.net/) has code for setting up particles. Just make a smoker or flamer, attach it to something in the scene, and set its release rate to something like SmokerFactory.SMOKE_RATE or SmokerFactory.FLAME_RATE and you should get particles.
I’ve had some problems with particles myself as well, but more to do with bounding volumes. They seem to end up sticking at an enormous radius, but I’m looking into that now. For the moment it actually seems to work better not to have particle bounds, since the bounds end up so huge that the particles are always drawn, and I imagine the bounds calculations slow things down a little. Plus they look awful in bounds view.
Since it is not a complete example… Maybe you could explain what is not happening rather than making us guess? 
It is challenging to say the least to explain what is not happening but I will give it a shot
@shingoki - thank you for your input, I will look into it. I was really hoping to gain a solid understanding of the particle system.
@shingoki - thanks for the info, sadly I am still experiencing the same problems.
Any and all attempts to update the location of the particle emitter cause the particles to disappear as well as all other objects.
Setting the setRenderQueueMode(Renderer.QUEUE_ORTHO) on the ParticleMesh causes no objects to be seen, though the Mesh Vet and Tri counts do indicate that
ORTHO will only show stuff that is within the two planes z=1 and z=-1 (not sure why).
To get an orthogonal projection without this restriction, set the camera to parallel projection, there is code for this in some of the demos. I made a render pass to do this for aircarrier, so that I can switch to parallel projection for hud elements, then back again for everything else.
As a first test, just try not using the ORTHO queue and see if you can see anything?