Material Panel

Preview A list box at the right of this area, list all materials of current scene. The left top window preview the selected material. You can change the geometry by right-click on this window, and drag to rotate the geometry. Below the preview window, an edit box let you set the selected material's name. At the bottom of this area, there are three buttons: New, Delete, Assign. New is for creating a new material. Delete is for removing the selected material. Assign is for applying the selected material to selected objects. Basic Properties In the upside of this area, you can set material's color properties, include Ambient, Diffuse, Specular, Emissive. The middle part is for Power ( control how sharp the specular effects are ) and Shade Mode ( determine the intensity of color and lighting at any point on a polygon face ). The bottom part is for setting material's styles:     Specluar Enable: toggle Specular Reflection on and off.     Generate Caustic:  choosing whether generate Caustic.     Refraction: set the Refraction Index of material. Textures There are eight buttons, form left to right, top to bottom, in turn show 0 - 7 layer textures of material ( see illustration above ). You can click anyone to select a texture for corresponding layer. Shader The two buttons at the top of this area is for loading shader text from a file and clearing shader text. The edit box at the middle is for editing shader text. At the bottom, the combo box is common D3D Render States list. And two buttons, save as... and save, is for saving shader text to disk file. The shader text only update to scene at loading or saving.

Texture Play
Texture Play is a serial of textures that apply to material in turn at runtime. This technique generally is used to simulate fire, water, etc.  Only one button in this area. Click this button will pop up Texture Play Dialog:

In upside of this dialog, left is all Texture Play list of current scene, just below this list box is an edit box for setting name of selected Texture Play. Right is serial textures list of selected Texture Play.
In downside of this dialog, there are four buttons on the left: New List is for creating a Texture Play.  Delete List is for removing selected Texture Play.  Add Texture is for appending a texture to serial textures. Delete Texture is for removing selected texture. On the right, Frame Time specify the interval of switching texture in runtime, it control how fast take turns of serial textures. No Circle indicate whether cycle serial textures or not. ID is the resource number of the selected Texture Play. The bottom OK button close this dialog and apply selected Texture Play to current Material.

Controller
Animated parameters list of current Material. You can select parameter by left click, then edit it in Animation Panel. Also can right click a parameter to change it's controller, see Controller box.