Grimoire (atys)
one thing i have noticed in game is that the particle system and the sound associated with an effect often (in my case always) degrades the FPS of the game...in fact there is such a burst of memory usage that the game "lags" terribly when i am casting spells alone, and it is even worse when there is a group of people all casting at once...
Platform? Video card? Driver version? If you're on Linux are you using the latest proprietary driver? Don't use software or Nouveau. My hunch is that you're on Linux with Software-based Mesa or the Nouveau driver. Ryzom may have been developed in the days of the fixed pipeline but the particle system in particular does have some accelerators that are absolutely essential to perform up to standard. It sounds like you're in full software and not utilizing the GPU at all.
Grimoire (atys)
my question is, would it be too much to ask if an option for less intensive particles or a more efficient particle system were implemented? this is possible, but it is largely due to (in my opinion from experience) textures in the particles being too large, or the particle model being too messy (such as duplicates being rendered for the same spell effect, or way too many particles per effect being rendered) and possibly in the coding of the particle systems...
The particle system in Ryzom Core is fairly superb, especially considering its vintage. I don't think many of the particles implemented in-game are too intense. Maybe when you have a large number of systems running nearby (other players casting a in a large battle.)
That being said the particle system and the landscape system use a woefully small amount of the GPU due to the fact of the reality of technology when it was developed. We're attempting to upgrade the driver to a more modern OpenGL implementation and in the process hopefully begin offloading a lot of this complexity to the GPU rather than the CPU. But it's a lot of work and there's really only one person working on it part time (dfighter.)