I know very little about the 317 game engine but Particles aren't very hard to do if you're using OpenGL. I can put something that I wrote for a class up if you're interested. The design behind a particle system is very simple.
The way I had it was first loop through and update the position of each particle and draw them.
Code:
glBegin(GL_POINTS);
for(Particle p : particles) {
p.update();//update position
glColor3f(p.colour.red, p.colour.green, p.colour.blue);
glVertex3f(p.location.x, p.location.y, p.location.z);
}
glEnd();
But like I said; that's using OpenGL