Just for kicks I enabled addiditve blending which resulted in... ABSOLUTELY NO LOSS OF FPS. Shown here are spherical explosions (200 particules per explosions), still at 60 fps. I captured the video filming the simulator because I was hoping the quality would be better than when filming my ipod (the pixels on my computer screen are larger).
I added a lua interpreter. The graphics (font/ship/background/bullets) are loaded from lua scripts. Also, openGL is now set up for 3D graphics (before, objects far away from the camera were as big as the objects near).