Allow particles access to materials texture
Instead of mapping their own textures in the particles panel, allow particles access to an object's material textures. That way any animated changes to a material could affect the generation of the particles as well.
1 Comment
You mean for Cycles materials? That's an old discussion. The same problem applies to textures used for physics simulations like smoke, or for the displacement modifier.
I agree that this should all be unified. I remember there were mentioned some issues with the internal structure of Blender, which would make it quite a bit of work, though.
A first stumbling block would be, that Cycles has no such thing as a texture, independent from a material definition, and importing the old-kind textures into Cycles materials is difficult, too, as some kinds of procedural textures available there don't fit nicely into Cycles, due to certain limitations which allow for efficient GPU rendering.