Particle Effects Help

Good Morning,

I am playing with the demo version of TGB to verify that it will fullfil the requirements we have for our game before purchasing the licenses. Which of course means that I can't access the online documentation. So I am hoping that someone here might be able to assist me with a technical issue I am having regarding particle effects.

I have a missle which will be fired from a ship, the missle is a static sprite, the rocket flame is an animated sprite, and the smoke is a particle effect. These all seem to work pretty well, the rocket flies, the flame is properly mounted, and the smoke leaves a trail. However I have a couple of things that I would like to do to improve the look of all of this.

First the smoke starts off with a "puff" of particles, this looks ok, but it's basically set out in a perfect circle which gets larger, like someone blowing a "smoke ring". For a missle I would like to instead have it start off with a high volume of smoke "blasting" out the back of the missle before it launches, then have a more steady smoke stream for the missle.

The missle travels at a speed of 150 on a 1024x768 camera view. This causes puffs of smoke to be left on the trail about every 1/4 of an inch. I would like a more solid smoke trail.

Any ideas what settings I need to adjust?

I tried changing the effects quantity life, to 0,100, .2,50, 1, 10. But all that did was make my smoke completely disappear.

Also any idea how I get it to come out shooting from the back of the missle instead of in a perfect circle around the flame?

Thanks!