nParticle Flame.

Using the nParticles I've made a rudimentary flame, with the aim being a more game friendly approach with lighter render times.

I can see the good parts of the flame, and i like the way it is looking but it definitely has a long way to go; with the centre of the flame, particularly at the head of the torch, being a bit see through.

It looks a bit clean at the moment, but when i spread the particles out more it starts to look very blobby. This could be to do with my lack of experience with the particle system, but also could be one of the reasons that this method isn't used very heavily for games, with animations tending to use fluid dynamics and containers, and games tending to use sprites.

Here is the incandescence ramp I'm using, based on normalised age, making the origin of the flame the brightest and hottest point.

I also used the hyper shade editor to add a ramp shader to a multiply divide node, then take that output and use it as the incandescence input for the particle shader. This is what gives it the nice outer glow.