Trails can be used for many purposes. They can be attached to machines to create exhaust. They can be attached as floating whiskers to Chinese dragons. How they are made is by drawing steps between particles. A stretchy sprite is interpolated in the space between particles rather than at each particle location. It is not very difficult to create a ribbon effect, but it can be tricky to get it to scale correctly into the scene and animate nicely over its lifetime.
Create a new particle system in your package called MyTrailTest.
In Cascade, set the Required module's settings to Sort Mode: PSORTMODE_Age_NewestFirst so new particles will be in front of older ones, and Sub UV | Interpolation Method: PSUVIM_Linear, with a Sub Images Horizontal and Vertical count of 4. This will mean the SubUV texture we'll use will render out in a linear order, as we discussed earlier in this chapter in the recipe: Using SubUV charts to achieve particle diversity...