Who can make the nicest looking fireworks? Deadline is 31st december, 23:59 GMT.

Any language, any library. Should be able to compile and run with minimal fuss, posting of pre-built binaries is encouraged. It should run for at about a minute, and be judged for that time.

After everyone has posted, we vote for which one we liked best (other than our own). Simple!

Anyone in? Suggestions for improvements?

I'm not going to tell people what to use, but obviously it's more fun if as many people as possible can compile it. If you make it harder to compile, less people will view it. Then it might be good to post several screenshots or a video of the fireworks in action

I'm working on an allegro 4.4 opengl game framework type thing.

This would help / encourage me to work on the particle system aspect of it.

Great!

Sure, I can't see why not.

A shame. But if you get the time, it should probably not take too long to whip something up

Check out what I made!
{"name":"dogs+and+fireworks.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/7\/d798566490103d72812529acaa259f1e.png","w":490,"h":490,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/d\/7\/d798566490103d72812529acaa259f1e"}

No.. But my general direction of thoughts is recursion(fractals).

I'm already doing something horribly wrong with my particles in XNA, it chokes my pretty decent PC with ~200 particles

Just a generic List<T>, no fancy pools or anything, but I might need to look into that anyway

Nice, that's generally what I planned to do, putpixel() is it.
However, there are many things can be improved.. E.g. perhaps colors shouldn't just go black, but lose color(move to grayscale), at the time with losing brightness overall. In addition to gravity, there could be wind and air-drag force.
This one without fractals though, probably

Append: Frank, source please?

Could someone help me out with something?

I'm having problems getting a velocity vector for my particles in an explosion that results in a "ring" in the sky.
Doing something like below is fine and dandy for your avarage explosion:

foreach(Particle p in m_particles)
{
p.Velocity = new Vector2(-(rand.NextDouble()),rand.NextDouble());
}

The problem is how to create those velocities whilst not accepting a minimum range.
Like 0.1f for X and 0.1f Y not being acceptable, however it should be possible to have 0.1f X but Y being 0.9f ... Does that make any sense?

I've been scratching my head for some time now and soon I'll probably start ripping hair

You could do something like...

#include <cmath>

VECTOR::VECTOR(const POLAR &v)
{
    _x = v.r * std::cos(v.t);
    _y = v.r * std::sin(v.t);
}

Where v.r is the velocity (radial length) and v.t is the angle (theta).

That way they all have the same outwards speed, but each can have a different angles.

If they all had the same outward speeds, you'd wind up with a ring again. Unless you're actually using a Z component of course.

Look closely:

{"name":"China_Kyling_Fireworks_Display_Shell.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/7\/c77bbc14d1cbe12137ac4c31de4dad04.gif","w":400,"h":400,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/7\/c77bbc14d1cbe12137ac4c31de4dad04"}