I well I did go ahead and jazz up the particle engine applet with images. It looks quite cool - provided you're using a non broken JRE. It looks like crap on the default Windows IE JRE (1.1) because they apparently went ahead with their simplified implementation of transparency. Each pixel either off, on, or every-other in a pathetic attempt to do transparency. Even 1.2 (Java2) would be an improvement ...
Get the
latest JRE for your platform before trying the
latest version of the Particle Engine fiddlings. There's only one base image, but looks neat - if I do any more I'm not gonna worry about old JRE's - much easier. I'm developing on OSX which has 1.3 as default anyhow.
annoyed