Reducing particles by using textures - undesired box effect

Hi,

I've been working with particle effects for some time now.
In order to reduce the number of particles in every burst I've created some 'fake particle cluster' textures that work fine - as soon as the texture is loaded !

So my current problem is, how to preload the texture to prevent people from seeing "strange boxes" appear instead of my lovely particles ...

It seems that I won't get that effect as the texture has already been loaded in my client..so its a bit difficult to fix the problem.

Would displaying the texture on a particle with full alpha on work ? So kind of "load the invisible texture", or maybe only a close to transparent alpha ?

Any other ideas ?

Thanks a lot.
Noctua

Put the texture on a side of the object that is *not* visible. Like, hollow a sphere and put it on the inside.

That way it will be loaded and should be cached in most cases. But don't count on it.