Ok so some good news! The puffball slowdown isn't from rendering, it's from script execution time! So, I think i'm gonna start working on some script commands to define particle systems, and our first particle system will be the puffballs fallin out of the sky. By bringing it into native c++ code it should be a lot quicker execution speed, and it'll be nice to have a particle system so that we can do things like fountains and sparks and dust (for the cave map) and other stuff like that.