Viciously difficult Particle Problem- Help Urgently Needed

I’ve been ripping my hair out over a problem. I have a particle system set up on my “ground” plane that emits short-lived, static particles. These particles are instanced planes. The planes themselves have an animated texture depicting a bullet impact on snow. This all works so far. The problem is, I need the animated texture to begin its video for each particle as soon as the particle is created. In other words, I want each particle’s animated texture to play on a per-particle basis, starting at the particle’s birth. I’m using a very recent build of 2.56a. I am aware of the Particle/Strand mapping option for textures, so it seems like the functionality to tell a particle’s age exists somewhere. I am also aware of animation offsets and I think there might be something to that as well.

Any help would be enormously appreciated. (Please!):D:evilgrin::evilgrin:

Don’t think you can do it

Only chance I see at the moment are textured billboards instead of planes… they work like sprites where you strip your animation in cells and rows, so you get 25 frames in a 5x5 image. They work fine in Blender 2.5x

How many particles are you dealing with? I’m assuming more than would make it possible to do it by hand, creating planes with different textures and animation offsets?

I’m using a lot of different particles; easily several thousand…