Well animating frame by frame explosions was a failure... so I decided to try and code some in actionscript. Let me know what you think, and provide details on how I may improve on it. Thanks.

http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1258963234

It may run slow for some of you, since each puff of smoke launches it's own event listeners. This will be optimized.

Update (version 2) : http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1259037581

Wooah. That's pretty sweet. Nice job.

why not try and make the flash/fire also in as3? the smoke is good but the flash is kinda ugly and too fast

Quote from Mr.Pancake

why not try and make the flash/fire also in as3? the smoke is good but the flash is kinda ugly and too fast

Kay. Lemme know what you think.
http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1259037581

Also just observed that using trace statements affects performance, even outside of the flash compiler/output thing...strange.

The white stuff in the first one looked bad.. And there's too much yellow stuff in the second one.. or it lasts too long imo. Really neat though.

Nooooo it's fire not yellow stuff lol. I'll tweak it sumore.

I like it, but it lags after three or four explosions.

Yeah I know because the swf I uploaded doesn't delete old explosions and stuff. I fixed everything up here in the fla so it runs without hiccups

Alright, this is probably as good as it's going to get. Added white out when explode and reduced life of yellow stuff.

http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1259120938

Please tell me if you experience any performance issues. The timer at the top left can be used to tell, if it slows down then it's laggin.

I don't know, I kind of liked the first blast. The yellow looks like flying gunpowder or something.. Doesn't look bad, though.

The problem with this explosion is that there is no expanding. It just suddenly emerges out of nowhere then dissipates. Really great for AS though.

The problem is that the "yellow stuff" is supposed to be the flare. You don't see the flare for more than .8 seconds, yours obviously doesn't care. If it's supposed to be fire, it looks nothing like fire. Needs more detail.

The smoke is decent. Although it branches out strangely sometimes, making it look odd.

lol, yellow stuff.