I have been following a tutorial on How to make water in Poser. It was for Poser 5 and 6! Since I now have Poser Pro 2014/Game, Is it possible to animate a displacement map so I can create an animated ocean? Or any other advice would be appreciated. Cheers

Turn on Animated for the displacement channel - it is the little icon left of the value of displacement in the PoserSurface node

If you set it to Animated, a dial will appear in the properties of the prop and you can animate using that dial. You can do this for any material node which has that little icon besides the value. The name is constructed from the material zone name, the node name and the order number in that node

Basic approach - large high res ground plane. Plug in a Wave2d node into displacment with u/v pos set to one corner and then as wimvdb says animate the phase node or use the frame number in the variables number to change phase (not sure units seem quite small). One node by itself won't look too good so thought is to add together several wave2d nodes with varying origin, amplitude and frequence to create more interesting effect (one wave2d node to be the main wave and the others to cut up the surface)

Beware using displacement maps will slow down the render quite a bit and add a water material won't improve things.

Seem to remember this has been covered before so worth a forum search if not already done.

     I know three ways to animate a displacement map to get animated water, but the forum keeps deleting critical parts of my posts.

     One method uses a sequentially numbered series of JPEG displacement maps, placed in a folder.  Use a movie node to drive the displacement.  Instead of an AVI, load the first JPEG into the movie node (you can do this, as of P9/Pro2012 SR3).

Links to demos in my Photobucket - best I can do, because the forum is screwed up.

animated water demo 1

animated water demo 2 (note foreground pool)

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     Oh, you could download the Eldar house enviro;  it has running waterstreams, plus the waterfall uses the matrix method, and the pool's concentric ring ripples use math-animated U,V scale & offset.   It's three zips;  you'll need all three.

those gifs look great, seach!

If I want to make an open ocean or a sea, with waves does the same methods above apply? Cheers

     Yes;  it is only a matter of scale.  The two demo animations posted show choppy ripples (the first example) and rounded swells (the second fish pond example).  The displacement map sequences are asymmetrically seamlessly tiled and looped in time, so I can cover huge areas by simply increasing the tiling factor.

     For open seas, I would use a two-stage displacement;  a large-scale gross shape effect, and a finer small scale effect for detail.  You could procedurals for one and maps for the other.  Or, you may be able to re-use the same map set at large scale with high displacement and again at small scale with only a low amount of displacement.

     You would benefit from going through this thread on sea waves by bagginsbill;  it is more geared toward using procedurals to drive the displacement.  You asked about using maps to animate water displacement, so that's what I explained.  But don't disregard using procedurals.