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Classic missions are always great. I like the William Steele and/or Thomas Porter series as they cover a lot of city map area, and also like the old Bikerdude/Melan missions for their amazing vertical gameplay, but I'm also a sucker for the weirder sci-fi and fantasy environments, aka Swing, The Ravine, Marsh of Rahena, Illusionist's Tower, etc. These don't have a lot of backstory and don't lead you around with readables, but they will have environmental a-ha moments. And they keep the incessantly annoying ghouls and spiders to a minimum, which is always a plus.

Damn, this is exactly what I need. Thank you!

https://www.violationentertainment.com/temp/threedeescanseisbarosab1_prev.jpg I'm back again with another statue, as a thanks to the entire TDM team and community. Originally from here:- https://threedscans.com/vienna/eisbaer_und_seehund/ This involved putting into practice some new methods using primarily Blender and MeshLab, remeshing and getting an actual neat and curated UV unwrap (a lost art), useable geometry and even some new methods for getting decent LOD stages. Amazingly, I managed to get the LOD spanning from 22K down to under 500 triangles, which is a crazy threshold for this kind of process. It's all thanks to the UV map, I think, being able to keep UV islands in relative comfort while lowering the polycount. The geometry is still very "matrixy", in my opinion, but it's 1000X better than older remeshing methods I'd tried before. Just almost good enough for game development. Almost. Anyway, it is still a much nicer result than in my previous bake and I learned a lot. I spent about 7 hours cleaning out all of the little fleas (geometric artifacts from the original 3D scanning) from the normalmap, followed by some loving texture-painting and other manual adjustments. All textures are 4K but I expect those to be mostly downsampled, and I apologise for not making this engine-compatible out-of-box, but I doubt many of you will struggle. It already contains ASE and DDS files. All it really needs is MTR file, as far as I remember. Once again, all textures (mixed with the bake from the original 3-million triangle source) come from:- www.goodtextures.com License remains CC0 and hoping some of you find it useful:- https://www.violationentertainment.com/temp/threedeescanseisbarosab1.zip Cheers!

In this case for a shadow and physics mesh imo is very easy, just make two extra copies of the lowest LOD, slap the shadow material in one and the collision material on the other and make sure both occupy the same space and are on the same item mesh/layer has the main model. In blender (or any other 3D Tool) you don't need to import any TDM material or texture, you just make a basic material for the shadow and collision mesh and make sure to give each the name of the shadow and collision material respectively (not the .mtr file name the full material name, inside the file), is that easy! bear_statue_example.7z ps- here is a fast example of what I said, sorry for not making it plug&play to TDM. I add too mess with the model because I use Modo and it doesn't open ase files, I add to convert to obj using another tool and also rotate it in Modo to be able to work with it, so now is not a, one to one, to the original model and so shouldn't be used with the LOD's that were provided, this because I assume they will not match, but I didn't tested, plus the material name for the main mesh is not the correct, only for the shadow and collision mesh's are correct (follows doom 3 convention). This should be seen just as a model for anyone to know how a shadow and a collision model should be setup. (for those that don't know) I also used the second LOD counting from the last because the lowest LOD seems to not follow the main model silhouette perfectly, it could very well work at the distance but not for a shadow and collision mesh.

@polygroveCheck out this thread: Also the mission list on the wiki (https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Fan_Missions_for_The_Dark_Mod) is very helpful for finding things to play; particularly for sorting by author or mission type. Personally, I would suggest Kingsal and Moonbo are the two mission authors you must look into if you are new to TDM. They really raise the bar in terms of consistently crafting artful, innovative missions with a particular penchant for outstanding level design, storytelling, and atmosphere. (Iris is very similar in that respect. So if you liked Iris you may also like work by those two authors.)

I have no real favorites, some time ago it was one list of some missions, now it would be other. Several years ago (circa 2017-2018): Penny Dreadful (especially, 3) House of Locked Secrets Return to the City Lich Queen's Demise No Honor Among Thieves Full Moon Fever Now: Painter's Wife Hazard Pay Volta and the Stone Chronicles of Skulduggery 1-3 Perilous Refuge Iris New missions don't "destroy" previous, but time flies and they sometimes do something new, and can be more accessible, though I may return and replay older works, older favorites. Perhaps, it would be even more interesting to see what are the best missions for newcomers, both well-designed and accessible.

As someone who doesn't have skills, I feel like people who have submitted ratings to ThiefGuild's TDM missions (now including myself) - have helped out in a way. It's quite important to know which missions are the best to recommend to new players. Or are there other TDM FM rating summaries out there I don't know about? I saw some polls about missions in forum somewhere, but didn't find them again.

@Jedi_Wannabe thank you so much for playing! I hope you enjoy through to end. I would definitely describe this as more my first finished release than my first map. The road there is paved with many abandoned attempts and reworks. Given I had been so bad at releasing anything over the span of really my entire life, I had no idea how many releases I realistically had in me. So for this one, for all its lingering faults, I hope I made it count.