The current particle system uses dynamic allocation of particle
instances for keeping track of particle instances. This adds unnecessary
overhead in case the code does not need a handle to this particle which
is the case in pretty much all instances.
The new non-persistent particles are stored in a standard vector without
dynamic allocation which should make the processing steps using this
vector much faster and allow better scalability in case more particles
are used by a mission.
As described in #1278, the current scripting system has issues with
handling non-trivial C++ types. Since fixing that deficiency is too much
work, especially since we are in a feature freeze, I decided to simply
enforce the usage of trivial types for scripting handles. Fortunately,
only two handles used non-trivial types so it was relatively easy to fix
those instances by dynamically allocating those and only storing the
pointers in the lua memory.
This fixes a bug in JAD-XA where the game would crash at the last boss.
Also, I noticed that the HudGauge handle used a copy of the hud gauge
rather than a pointer to the actual instance so I'm pretty sure that any
scripting changes to a custom HUD gauge simply didn't work before.
asarium