   Animated Texture?
  I was told, "This model uses animated textures." I am not sure how to take that. Is the image file itself animated? Does thier game engine animate it? Is it animated in the modeler? I can't get any more information out of the authors.I am opening some files from modding resources for a game. The files are supposedly the model they use for a planet and 4 textures. There really isn't much info on how thier engine put things together, so I am doing my best to reverse engineer things with guesses.When I open thier model in 3DS Max, it looks like a piece of a sphere. Makes sense, it is background and will always face the player. My problem is I don't know how they are using thier textures. I am sure the import process is screwed because I just see blotchy rectangles instead of any of the textures.In the game, the clounds obviously move as if the model was an entire layered sphere was being rotated, but it isn't an entire sphere when I look at thier model. Just a little less than the front hemisphere.I opened all the texture files in Photoshop, and they are all .dds. I am not a photoshop guru, but I don't see anything that indicates the image files themselves contain some kind of animation. Do DDS files even support any kind of animation? the only file format I've seen that does is .gif. I am also unsure if DirectX could actually use those. Could it?Could that phrase "it uses animated textures" mean the engine does something special with them? If so what could it be doing?Here are links to the image files that are used for this particular model. Let me know what your guesses are on how to put this together into a planet:cloudsterraincontinenthaze
  I might have found a Blue's Clue!I found this in a related planet model file:start u 0.0start v 0.0end u -1.0end v 0.0duration 800rotation 0.0origin uorigin vAm I to belive they are off-setting each texture coordinate as they come into the shader in thier engine by a value interpolated between u=0.0 and u=-1.0 for a duration of 800 seconds?Would that make it look like the model was rotating around its y axis even though it wasn't?Also, I am not sure what the continent image is for. I mean yea, they look like continents, but they have the terrain image too. I believe continents modifies terrain somehow, but it doesn't look to be a bump map, because it has colors in it...