Particle editor question - "Move Particles Between 2 Control Points" initializer

I'm not sure this is the appropriate forum for this thread, but seeing as how the PE tutorial is in the tutorials subsection here, I figured it is. Anyway, I'm having trouble with the particle editor, specifically with the initializer from above.

I'm trying to create a laser beam particle (I'll have to point out this is not for TF2, but I know there are lots of folks knowledgeable about the PE around here), and I noticed in the wiki that the "Move particles between CPs" initializer seems perfect. It is, but there's one problem - as soon as I add a "Lifespan decay" to kill off the particles, the beam spazzes out, and starts spawning new particles where the old ones died (and not in the beginning of the stream as it should)

It's probably a long shot, but has anyone managed to get this to work?

The only seemingly related info I could find was this on the wiki:

"Q: When I used the rope render type, it flickers around for some reason!
A: Rope rendering clicks onto the nearest particle when a particle dies, the only solution is to destroy and create all particles simultaneously."

However, my problem happens if I use render_animated_sprite instead of render_rope too, plus I'm not sure what "destroying and creating all particles simultaneously" really means in this case.

I need it for a laser-type weapon, so it needs to be spawnable between two arbitrary points in the world - thus I'm doing it with control points. The setup I have so far is this:

max particles: 100
material: sprites\tp_beam001.vmt


Renderer: render_rope with default settings

Operators:

Movement Basic, default settings

Initializers:

Move Particles Between 2 Control Points, min/max speed: 50, end CP: 1 (with coords 0, 0, 50 for testing)
Lifetime Random: min/max 3

Emitter:

emit_continuously, rate: 50, unlimited

So basically they start spawning and moving towards the CP and it looks perfect, but since there's no decay operator they never die and keep moving after they've passed the CP. When the system reaches its particle limit it just stops spawning. If I add a Lifespan Decay or Alpha Fade & Decay, as soon as one particle dies, the rest start spawning where it died and it looks completely broken.

Good idea about the medic beam though, I'll have a look at how it's done.

Ok, I had a look at the medigun beam but it seems to be set up completely differently:



My guess is that the beam itself is handled by the code, probably because it needs to utilize splines or something similar for the bending etc, and just creates a chain of these particles along the way. Which doesn't really help me, sadly I *could* do it that way but it wouldn't look good for a beam that's supposed to be straight and smooth.