I had a discussion with another developer about the moonphase virtual sculpture. They mentioned a technique that might improve bandwidth usage by using llSetTextureAnim instead of setting the offset of the texture directly. The idea being that llSetTextureAnim would be running on the actual client which doesn't require any bandwidth, while llOffsetTexture is run on the server and all the clients viewing that object need to receive a message that the object change.

So I did some testing with llSetTextureAnim and I couldn't get the same results. When you use ROTATE in llSetTextureAnim then you can't specify the texture offset, only which portion of the texture you want to use. It seems like it is used to have a tiled texture where each section of the tile can be used as an individual tile. In my case, I used a half transparent texture and am rotating that around the sphere. Using llSetTextureAnim I don't see a way to get the same effect. I'm a little slow most of the time so I may be missing something. Here is a screen shot of using

default
{  state_entry()
{
    llSetTextureAnim(ANIM_ON | LOOP | SMOOTH | ROTATE,ALL_SIDES, 1,1,  0, TWO_PI, TWO_PI/360);
}
}

I also tried using a non-ROTATE texture animation which only cause the texture to turn on and off when the "tile" reached the non-transparent section.

I really like the idea of reducing bandwidth by having the texture changes run on each client, but don't see a way to get this to work for this sculpture. llSetTextureAnim is definitely a good tool for the tool belt and I'll have to consider some sort of sculpture using a tiled texture. That would mean that each client would see something different on their machine so there couldn't be a discussion about the "current" look of the sculpture between two people, but I'm not sure that's a real problem.