color changing tiles?

You'll need a vtf with multiple frames. You could just make it an animated texture, but you can also have the map control it via env_texturetoggle. env_texturetoggle is probably the way to go, since you can manually control each tile within the map, rather than just letting animations do it for you.

If you decide you want to just animate them, you may want to make sure that the tiles don't all animate together, staying in sync. You can randomize that stuff through material proxies.

I was actually doing a disco floor light sequencer generator in flash some time ago. Send me a PM if that sounds interesting.

Or if all the tiles were white textured func_brushes, you could use the 'Color' input to set their colors. Combine it with a logic_case that's recieving a 'PickRandomSuffle' input every so often, you could have randomly picked colors

You can also use material proxies that first sets a random color to the texture face if used on a funch_brush, and then changes the color over time. I'm pretty sure you can make it switch instantly too, I haven't digged deep enough into it to tell. Here's where I found this info: http://www.nodraw.net/2010/01/dynamic-materials-with-proxies/

Good job guys on necrobumping a one year old thread.
Something I did for fun to have a face appear in the colors of a rainbow was to make a one dimensional texture (one pixel high) that is simply a rainbow. In the .vmt I gave it a texturescroll proxy and In hammer I set the texturescale to some crazy big amount. It looks quite alright.

That's a nice trick!

I wonder, is there a proxy that lets you directly set material variables using I/O? That would be awesome.

Edit: Nope. There are two! MaterialModify and MaterialModifyAnimated. But I worry that they are global and not for materials on a specific brush entity.