The wheels of time have turned, and so has our mechanism of creation. Throughout the long months of this year I will be forging project Retribution. Within recent days, I meet an odd sense of nostalgia, as I am returning to a race whom I last worked with back in 2004 - nearly a decade ago.


The DyiithJhinn first taking shape, an era ago...


... but, really, it was only yesterday. Time is a strange thing to someone like me.

The machine devils, the DyiithJhinn, took a back seat during the era of 2004-2009, when I was focused on, at best, other areas of my world. During the revision process of my novel and, indeed, the various projects surrounding Black Sun, the DyiithJhinn still remained in the backdrop, though I consciously acknowledged my desire to bring them to life once more.

The DyiithJhinn play a large part in my writing, but only in the second novel. The first is some 600 thousand words, at 1300 pages, and hasn't been worked on in three years. It will likely never be worked on again. Thus, the much-needed revision of their design, their image, and their role in the universe had been unnecessary and thus ignored. Until recently.


In 2004 I was using Rhino 3d to model the sprites in nurbs. The necessity for efficiency and detail had been lost on me. This allowed their designs to remain smooth and nearly organic, while I struggled to figure out meaningful lore to their mechanics. WarGiant had created many of the awesome building graphics for them, as well as some of the units.


Trivia: The DyiithJhinn's command center, if compiled with RetroGRP normally, would crash starcraft because RetroGRP's algorithm could not handle the sharp edges of its spinning animations. I had to blur the frames to get it into the game.


Picture, if you will, Bisu spotting the most unusual of contraptions with his fast obs. The Cyclops, a siege tank that flips over to siege so it can attack air, and the Scorpion, a light hovertank, and the Enslaver, another hovertank variant that attacks with both autocannons and missiles. How times have changed!


The Terrorfiend was an important model for me due to the complexity of its weapons. However, rendering the tiny SC-size frames with lighting for the muzzle flashes took 30+ minutes a frame. Technology!


The original DyiithJhinn schemes used simple camo textures. Later on, as their lore developed, they assumed two major materials - A glossy steel-blue, and a very glossy gray. As lore later evolved, the steel-blue material is a composite nanite-assisted elemental plating, and the glossy material is an extremely conductive element used for distributing Proteus elemental power throughout units.



The DyiithJhinn Steel-blue was used for the Undead in ITAS (circa 2004) as well, since I couldn't replicate their real appearance inside Brood War.


Heidomus Kaladonmus ("The Legend of Heidomus"), the total conversion in which the DyiithJhinn saw first major spectacle, focused on the story of the Heidomus, which involved few DyiithJhinn space forces. It was the first and last conversion I ever did music composition for that was actually used in the project itself.

One of the last modplug tracker pieces I ever made.

DyiithJhinn music in 2003-2004 was envisioned to be sort of a mix between electronic, gothic, and industrial. During my early and only experiments to make such music I turned to Audition for some unusual flanges. My experiments ended as quickly as they began and I abandoned the prospect of ever being able to make that style of music. To this day I wish I had such things at my disposal.

The Heidomus Kaladonmus project was important for my short-lived composition skills. In the distance between 2001ish and 2006 I was attempting to compose music. I was fucking horrible. As it turned out, music was probably the hardest skill I could have ever attempted to learn. I would have done myself better to have tried to learn programming. Too late now!

Whew! Who knew I'd spend literally almost half a day digging through my 14 terabytes of garbage trying to find this fucking title track? Well, I found it! So simple, yet it set the stage for Heidomus Kaladonmus, and was amongst the first tracks to help establish the sound of the universe as a whole.

This project saw the shift from modplug tracker to Cakewalk/gigastudio compositing. I had made tracks from both sources during its brief glimpse of life, and it greatly, greatly changed how I viewed my world musically. I've yet to find an actual composer/artist who makes music that sounds like what I envision my world as. I probably never will.

The work in Heidomus Kaladonmus lead to the establishment of what is called the "Fury OST", a selection of pieces I made in Cakewalk that greatly determine the baseline musical style I wanted to achieve with the universe. However, being incompetent, I could only scrape at shadows to bring it to life.


So much history, however, would be forgotten. In 2006 I dropped music composition, frustrated with my inability to understand the process of bringing things out of my head and to life. Melody escaped me, learning forever a damnable disability. Days darkened in 2006 beyond reconcile, and an age of shadow began. It wouldn't be another 6 years before, once more, the DyiithJhinn returned to the forge.

My world had evolved since the old days of yore. I had long since bid Starcraft farewell, and had endured great hardships at the hands of life. I had wisened, and my dreams had aged. The time had come to rebuild this race, its image, and its place in my creations.

Of course, all old assets are entirely worthless now. They were nurbs models, after all. Attempting to translate the legendary Dreadnaught into polygons was a folly venture, as the model easily clocked in at around 5 million polies once converted. Sure, you could put 5 million polies into any game worth its bear semen and not really have a problem. The problems, of course, come from the conversion process and formats. Not going to pan out sir, oh no!

I needed to model new ships, and in the process, rebuild the image of the machine devils from the ground up.



With Apex, a Starcraft 2 campaign, I established a set of techniques for the Necropolis that would transition to the DyiithJhinn. Apex predictably died, but the legacies left behind by its short-lived existence lived on in more important matters.


This sinfully ugly pile of shit was going to be one of the only ships I had ever made for the original HK project. Now, with project Retribution, it was one of only two designs I would use to build our new DyiithJhinn from.



The new Singularity takes fold. Its engine doubles as its weapon.


This is the Dreadnaught, one of the few DyiithJhinn models not to actually make it into the HK project. Many efforts were made to port this to polygons. They all failed. It is up to me to rebuild it!

[Girl Blog] It'll be tougher than it sounds... but force is the answer to everything!

Along the way, we've made some new friends!





The battle isn't over yet. There's still 30-40 DyiithJhinn ships waiting to be made. The legacy of project Retribution is carved into each and every single one of these images, and into others, too. The DyiithJhinn are only a tiny piece of a tremendous puzzle. And what good is a fleet... without a battlefield to fight in?



But that is, as they say, a tale for another day...