help with axis of progression for particle systems

Well, the hopefully the title (as long as it is) is enough to give you some idea what I'm looking for here. I just spent the several hours tweaking things in SL, reading the SL Scripting Wiki, and searching the forums and I can't seem to find an answer to my question (or at the very least not an obvious one).
Basically, what I want to know is if there is a way to control the direction in which particles progress. For instance, the default seems to be for them to propogate along the Z-Axis of the object. Also it seems I should be able to do the same thing with the velocity of the object (I haven't bothered to try that yet since it isn't what I'm looking to do). But I can't for the life of me seem to find any way to make them progress parallel to the world's Z-Axis if it doesn't coincide with the objects Z-Axis. Or along any other line for that matter.
Thank you for any help you can offer.

- Daemion

Without knowing what exact effect you are going for I can't give you much help as some things directly effect the shape or spread of the particles.

I don't know if you've tried this but you can specify a push. I know for sure with the drop pattern no matter the rotation of the prim the particles will move along the appropriate axis (specified by the push).

Look me up in world if you need more info or help (I only check the forums here and there whenever I'm bored so I may not reply as fast here).

-Zany Golem

Particles are emitted along the object's local z axis (change the ruler mode to local in the edit window to see it). So if you rotate the object and its z axis points along the world/global x axis, particles will go that way. You can do this dynamically (rotate the object by hand or with a script), the only exception is when using omega (rotation of particles), which uses the initial orientation of the emitter.

Acceleration works with all the patterns I believe, although I've not tested it extensively. It tends to make most sense with the drop and cones for most effects, although I saw a lovely one yesterday with a rotating angle that gave a sort of rotating slowly rising veil effect.

(And yes I'm sad enough I thought about how they'd done it and added it to my repertoire of cool particle effects).