Im glad to hear APE has the possibilty of being multiplatform, thats good news.
Plans for an APE utility program are in the works.
Eventually, I will do an overhaul based on your latest multiplatform billboard controller.
This utility will generate a visually designed particle system, and generate code for GLBasic.
One other thing in the future of APE, is spawnpoint mapping, using vertice data from objects. This allows tou to create object shaped particle spawn points.
I have already done this in the past, but alot of changes were made to GLBasic so I have omited this function for now.
Someday ill reimplement it, i feel this will be important to some game developers.
With the this vertice mapping, you will be able to "write" words that are built out of particles, which was the coolest effect i doing with it.
As a matter of fact, the idea comes from SpriteZ image mapping function, the difference here is you will use an object instead of a bmp.
If anyone has questions about constructing specific special effects, i am more than willing to throw you some ideas to help you make some cool stuff.
Here are generic ideas that ive done with this system over the years:
Bullets, missles(3d and guided with smoke and rocket fire exhausted), water fountains, water falls, snow, snow melting on the ground, lightning, clouds(moving ones), rain falling, rain splash on the ground, explosions(multi layered, smoke and debris and fire), explosion spall, glass shattering, steam, tornados! , black hole(part of APE is gravitation energy, both positive and negative), fireworks, fireballs, arrow storms, bugs crawling on the ground, bugs swarming.