function describing a 2d explosion

Game Play & Game Design
#1

I am currently designing a game that has alot of explosions in it, of varying sizes… I want the explosions to be real eye candy… right now I have some explosion sprites but the sprite sheets are so large I cannot fit them all into memory… does anyone know of any tricky ways to go about creating explosions, using minimal images… another challenge here is I am using a bitmap to draw to, so I am limited to x and y dimentions (no z)…

anyone know of any tricky algorithms to describe an explosion in 2d?

#2

Particles

#3

Memory problem?
goes to procedural

how?
particle can be created by glowing balls splitting around. For glowing on procedural you can like overdraw normal circle with alpha-ed one. Splitting around happens when you update the particles in orde 2 of position (accelleration). In case it’s not enough, maybe it can help