The pre-allocation setting specifies the total amount of particles you expect to have at render time. This is the sum of all renderable PRT Loaders, PRT Volumes, Particle Flows, Thinking Particles objects, etc. It doesn’t really matter if this amount is accurate, we tend to figure out exactly how much memory we have to spare then specify that amount in particles.
C++0X has/had lots of cool things. I miss concepts already. The move constructor looks pretty sweet, and I’m very ready for the auto keyword to be re-purposed. The only thing now is to wait for the standard to be finished, and Microsoft to write a compliant compiler. I don’t have high hopes for seeing anything usable until 2011 though.
EDIT: Microsoft’s site is pretty worthless for feature information, but it looks like most of this stuff made it into VS2010. Yay! http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd465215%28VS.100%29.aspx