It’s working like a charm!
Unfortunately, Illustrator seem to have some problem in displaying a HUGE number of particles moving about (go figure!). On these screenshots there are somewhere around 500 particles. Haven’t tried out just how many there can be at the same time but the frame rate took a severe nose dive at 2000. Hell, even 500 of ‘em little bastards was enough to drop it to barely acceptable.
I will try to find me a decent screencaster so I can post some moving picture magic. Also there are a lot of stuff I plan to add to the system, such as pulsars and vibrating particles.

NOTE: This is a continuation of my earlier post; PARTICLE, SCHMARTICLE.

UPDATE (Nov 22 – 18:50)

Oh, and a neat trick to keep the anchor point count to a minimum – and thereby, hopefully, improving the frame rate – is to draw the particles as a line between two points with same coordinates and setting the stroke cap as ’round’. This way you get a circle with just two anchors instead of four!