Yet another headdie brainwave so be warned.
I had an idea about how to incorporate animation into ship textures without having to load an ani or several texture files at once. I am thinking about a new texture type, say, -shimmer or something like that which is a normal single layer image file with an alpha channel. The Texture artist would would create some sort of pattern on it which the game loads. Then before/while rendering it in each frame the engine applies a distortion to the texture in a random fashion which would give a shifting pattern which is overlayed on the model.
The difficulties as I see them are
1: Does OGL support such a feature
2: Coding time/effort I imagine would be substantial
3: Load on the system/graphics card, would it be better than multiple static textures
4: How to apply the effect to a fully UV mapped model
5: How would it Effect mipmaps
Point 4 could be helped with a table or similar file that can be used to control some aspects of the distortion such as direction, number of distortion points and amount. But I have no clue about the others.
