Animted textures on objects

It is possible to animate any texture used in DromEd, be a terrain texture, interface image, bitmap particle effect, or custom object texture. This is done by creating each frame of the animation as seperate texture file and giving them all special names.

The naming convention is as follows:
The Dark Engine will animate any texture if the filename (in the .bin file for objects and meshes) ends with an underscore ("_"). It will animate it by cycling through all availiable images that have the same name, plus a number at the end. The extension of the files is ignored, so you can have .pcx and .gif frames as part of the same animation. These additional frames will not be loaded into the texture palette if you add the family that contains them to your mission.
So, Test_.gif will be animated to Test_1.gif, Test_2.pcx, Test_3.gif, etc.
Animated textures are looped, and also include the original filename (Test_.gif in this example) as the first frame.
You can also use .tga textures in your animation, but since the Dark Engine's support for .tga images is somewhat temperamental, always save your work before attempting to do so.

There are three limits:

First, the texture names, including the _#, must be equal to or less than 8 characters plus extension. So, TestFile_1.gif will not be animated, but TestFi_1.gif will be.

Second, every frame in the animation must use the exact same palette. (For a guide on creating common palettes using Bright, look here.

Third, I think the maximum number of frames you can use in a single animation is 20 (*_ through *_19) - however, you could use a carefully timed Model tweq to overcome this limit.

The rate (I haven't found a way to change it yet) seems to be fixed at around 4fps.