Best Guess At Dynamically Modifying Textures

Now I need to figure out how the hell I'm going to modify these textures dynamically. I'll admit I'm not exactly sure what I need to do for this. I think I'll go to the directx 9 tutorial on texture/mesh mapping and see if I can modify how that looks via WinDBG first. Once I think I have that figured out, I'll play with the Havok Engine's SDK samples and see if they have any examples of loading meshes/textures. If they do, I should be set. While I think ASS.exe is only using the Havok engine for physics, it may also share the same method for loading meshes/objects/textures. I figure being able to correlate how Havok does it it in source will greatly aid me in doing it in this target game. 

If that doesn't work, I may need to trace the texture from the point of being loaded to when it's rendered. I fear that would take a significant amount of time, so I'm really hoping that it doesn't come to that! 

So here's what I think my process will be:

1. Build and play around with the DirectX 9 SDK tutorial example code. Try and figure out what values I can flip to have textures 'shut off'.
2. Attach a debugger and see what modifying the values does. 
3. Play with the Havok SDKs examples and see if they contain examples with meshes I can modify.
4. Do the same as #2 but with Havok code.
5. See if I can find similiar code in ASS.exe, and again attach a debugger while playing and see what flipping bits does!

So yeah, that's my plan for now. If/Once I do all that I will start learning various hooking techniques and see if I can write an injector to allow me to modify it without a debugger! (This is the part I'm really looking forward to to be honest...).

OK time to hack...