Animated texture

From X-Wiki

Animated texture in X3 is a texture which consist of several bitmaps which are constantly swapped by the game engine, creating an illusion of animation.

How they are created

Every animated texture must have an entry in Animations file. Once defined, the texture's index in the Animation file is used as its name:

86; 
TAT_ONESHOT; NULL; 73; 89; 0; 500; // 0 dummy (no -0!)
TAT_ONESHOT; NULL; 73; 89; 0; 500; // 1 fireball explosion
TAT_ONESHOT; NULL; 90; 98; 0; 2000; // 2 explosion ring

In the example, the explosion ring texture has an index of 2 (counted from zero) and its texture name is: -2

Note that it must be prefixed with a minus sign to tell the game engine that it is a virtual texture.

How they are used

Animated textures are used in materials the same way as normal textures.

To be able so easily set them from 3D Studio Max or gmax, one can create a dummy texture, name it with correct texture name (-2.dds in the above example) and put it in dds directory. This way, the texture can be selected and applied as usual.

It will also be exported correctly with DBOX2.

Because the texture number is prefixed with the minus sign, the game will not use the fake texture in the dds directory but will look into the Animation file instead.