The wind slowly picks up.
The horizon grows dark.
You sense that a dark time is coming.
Or just a sandstorm.
A Deadly sandstorm.
This mod makes you able to create occasional sandstorms in any map.

Credits
MaximDude
I based the scripts off of his rain mod
He gives credit to TLB
Dauss
I copied small parts of code from his C-storm.
His C-storm also gave me the idea of this.

Update!
Now has 3 particles per frame.
The particles go at different velocities.
Edit
Reduced particles per frame to one. That should help with lag.
They also go faster to make up for the destruction.
Edit
PPF back to 2. There is now less lag.

can you make a scene to go with it so we can see what it does, also for us non-modders to play with it.

Just put the craft "sandstorm" in your scene and wait 10 seconds.
I will upload an image.
Edit Forgot a quote

oh, didn't occur to me to look in the craft section.

I should also make an explosive that makes it also. I put up a screenshot.

I tried it using brutality mod, it effectively shreds the coalition.

It doesn't seem to do damage to the dummies though.

The game also begins to slow down by about 1 third, I am using an i7 920 processor.

It is quite enjoyable.

sign of un-optimisation more than anything.

Um what? I dont understand the un-optimisation thing.

What it means is the code that controls the sandstorm is possibly not as efficient as it could be, thus causing the slowdown.

I think it's more the sheer number of particles that it creates than the code using excess cpu power. I will see if I can make it run any faster.

Sheer number of particles being massive -> not optimised. You should attempt to use the lowest number of particles possible.

You might be able to use an animation instead and use Lua to simulate the particles' effects to optimise it a bit. For a map-wide thing of this scale, there isn't much you can do, really.

I admit that I suck at lua scripting.

Make a /really big/ sprite with a few sparely placed sand bits in it, which breaks into individual sand when it gets near/hits the ground? Lot of work but no LUA.

I remember the mission "Nest" (viewtopic.php?f=24&t=16201&hilit=metal) had a lot of wind particles and it wasn't lagging very much, I think it was because his map wasn't wrapped and so particles are deleted when they move out of the map, where as here particles will keep on going around wrapped map and building up unless they eventually strike the terrain.