How do I fix particles to make it look like rain?

I wanna make a rain effect for my game, but I need to fix two things:

1: How do I make it so the particle can spawn on the entire cone or something like that, so the rain can come from multiple points, I have it set to 180 degrees.

2: I wanna make sure the particles don't go into indoor areas, so how can I make sure the particles don't go outside the bounding box.

1. Just fiddle with the settings. This is what anyone that posts a solution will do, but you can do it too. There’s probably a setting to randomize the x position a bit.

2. Probably not possible to limit where the particles can go. It’s more like it launches the particles with some properties and you can’t interact with them at all after that. You could possibly clip the particles with blend modes though.

The particle object won’t cover all use cases so it’s ok just to do it with sprites. Like create rain at a random x at the top of the screen. Move the rain down, and destroy them when hitting walls or if the go off the screen.

Could the rain be drawn on its own layer, and layer masking be used to isolate where it's drawn? (indoor/outdoor)

I went through several different phases working on my game, so here are a few ideas and what I ultimately did:

first, you could use multiple particle objects line up across the top of the screen. you can mess with the X and Y offsets on the particle object itself to do the effect you're looking for, I think.

for keeping them outside, I was having the particles destroy themselves on collision with solids. you can use collision filters if you want them to go through certain things. this requires you to actually generate objects rather than particles, and ultimately it created a ton of slowdown.

what I ended up doing was rather than destroying the rain, just have the raindrop teleport itself back to the top of the screen and start falling again. this fixed the processing speed, which I think was mostly just from rapidly destroying and creating new raindrops. randomizing the height it teleported to gave it enough variation to not look super organized, which was really important. I actually ditched the particles entirely and just spawned objects in a loop based on how heavily it was raining (using wait commands to ease the rain in, and randomness to destroy the drops when the rain was supposed to stop). this also meant I can make platforms wet and water plants with rain or have it do other effects. my rain is sprites with bullet behavior.

I tried a lot of effects, and I think ultimately changing the angle too much looks weird and unnatural--rain mostly falls in a grain in a localized area. think of looking into a streetlight in the rain at night--you can see that the rain is mostly similarly angled, so minor variation is okay but major variations is not so good.

Here's a walk through someone made.

https://youtu.be/nKv_WQB3E-A?si=jaAXQBkdimJAYFvx

I actually did this for two of my future upcoming projects that I will work on. In one of the stages I have a raining stage and used the particles to make the effect. While this isn't bad, I will be modifying it in the future to go for the heavy rain effect like in older games like KOF96 or Samurai Shodown. But for now it will work.

You can copy exactly what I did from the particle settings and copy how many you need for your game. Here are the pics from my project of how I set up the 'rain" effect. I set my particles high outside the layout in my project, I have nine copies of the rain particles in my project to try to give it the "heavy rain" effect. I have them extremely large but made the particle size 3 in the particle settings. Copy and adjust what you need for your project.

Rain particles in Moonstone Island:

youtu.be/fHn58YcTr-c

Spawned 2 copies with different size/speed.

Properties: