I am working on making a animated nuclear explosion for a RTS game. I made nuclear missiles that fly across the map and when it hits I animate a nuclear explosion. I have tried using particles and this is how it turned out and is somewhat laggy.
If it’s for an RTS, you probably don’t need to make it too intensive. You can set up particles in a manner similar to the model-based explosion and work from there. Realistically a nuclear explosion wouldn’t have that many particles - it may last a while but it doesn’t quite look like a fire fountain.
Understandably, the current implementation looks as though it’d lag quite a bit. There’s a lot of particles going off while the emitter is enabled in concentrated areas. In some cases, if you have multiple nuclear explosions, you could hit the render cap completely and some nuclear explosions may not even show up.