I just realized how to make the smoke not pitch black
if you change diffuse="0, 0, 0" to diffuse="96, 96 , 96" or diffuse="128, 128, 128" the smoke takes the color of the fire and blends over really nice.. but its a taste thing.. also apparently the fade values *are* used and additional flags ARE read, we just can't add additional "effect" types to a spell, and not define the sprites yet, but once we can do that.. oh boy, then this is gonna be one of the most epic moddable spell effect systems there is.
Also the reason i had to make the fireball larger again is that there is no easy way to transition fire-to-smoke when the particles are too small (but they ought to use lower opacity in in the sprites i guess but that'd require 2 sets of sprites (1 for fire, 1 for smoke)