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?

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
http://www.java-gaming.org/topics/hdr-fireworks-particle-engine-benchmark/25022/view.html