I am nearly 100% finished all ingame material related to this project. All that remains is a particle revision for the Xy to take advantage of new animated textures, some sfx, the Emperor-class and related stuff, and a bunch of abilities. I have managed to, through monkeyworking roletypes and co, fix the Undead's fleet composition and such.

Very soon I will be ready to begin p2's recordings and the last bits of p1 I need to fill in the holes.  I need to clear up around 2 terabytes of space on my recording drives for this. Following/during this, I need to begin creating the CGI portions... somehow. All along I am voicing and building the composition to accept p2 recordings.

Almost finished. So close. Depending how much I can focus and how long certain aspects take, maybe 2 weeks at most.

/e

Emperor is ingame with no problems so far. Ring and such work perfectly thus far. Now onto the polishing phase of ingame content.

That's true.  You made it look really interesting and now we wants.

Let me start by saying I understand your viewpoint and where you're coming from and I respect that wholly and utterly.

Now, allow me to explain some of the reasoning why I haven't released this as an actual mod.

The mod on its own is not playable. It would not be enjoyable to play past the point of what you're seeing in the videos - stuff shooting at each other. I've built all of the stats and such around balancing for video throughput. Some capital ships available at the beginning of the game have 1-2mill hp and do 20k-30k dps vs base ships and small capitals that have 80k hp and do 6k total dps.

The only custom ability I have in the game currently is the Ruby Cannon for the Zeral`Motakk (which the Crusader is temporarily using as a placeholder). Literally no other capital ship even has a default ability because none of them fit. Assuming I even get to making them, the Crusader will have a Dread cannon, the Fortress will have a fleet-destroying White Sun cannon, and the Emperor will have a smaller variant of the White Sun cannon. These are designed entirely for cinematic purposes.

The mod does not perform very well on anything larger than 9-12 planets. While I have been successful in eliminating many of the performance issues in sins, including removal of mines and reducing the number of fighters, my system struggles to perform reasonably well even on my blood bath map. The project is not at all optimized (for low-end computers). If you wanted to even get it to run you'd have to gut very specific textures from your sins installation since my particle textures alone easily cap the game's texture entry limit (not the ram limit, however). Simply put, when I realized the game wouldn't support my design I completely and wholly abandoned all plans related to gameplay-oriented material and geared the mod's production exclusively to how it looks and sounds.

The mod commonly crashes, especially on startup. I suspect this has something to do with what Major Stress posted about a few times; outdated text files that need to be outright replaced. I'll admit that every source file I've attempted to edit and put into the mod has typically crashed and I had to rebuild quite a bit of stuff as a result. It's still not 100% stable. However, I've never encountered the ram limit and its related instabilities.

Race content-wise it's not finished. I didn't touch researches or anything related. Races have disproportionately available units and unit strength. I tend to selectively disable stuff depending on what I am recording for timeline-wise.

This.

One of my last major Starcraft mods, Armageddon Onslaught, that was released publicly had quite a bit of its content stolen from it. In response to this and previous thefts I stopped releasing any project publicly. I don't want the 3d content of Black Sun to suffer the same fate because it's novel canon material, and I am not comfortable with having that material so easily available to be stolen. I do, however, plan to release all of the SFX and potentially the particles and textures as well regardless of my decision in relations to the project's content itself.

If none of that really matters to you I may consider a private release... but don't expect it to compare to any of the other actual mods available or in progress here.

I shall speak no more of this.

What are Gods but men with titles? This... this is what Men fear. What mere Gods can only dream of wielding...

I've been lurking around here for a while, and I've decided to chime in here.  I would love to play a mod with your models.  These models are without a doubt some of the best done, most creative models in the community, and you should be proud of that.  They are absolutely phenomenal.  And watching episode zero, your vision of them (frontal MAC-type cannons, ballistic weaponry, energy combination-type attacks) really fills a niche that I have found inadequately touched by any other mods.  If the Halo mod were complete, then our craving for that vision of a ballistic ship may not be so intense.  I also have to say that I love the long-body cruiser style of those ships, and the organized chaos of the spike race.

That being said, I can understand the flip side.  This is your work, and you want creative control over it.  You've been burned in the past and don't want it to happen again.  I can respect that, and I can't really find a fault in it.  You stated your intent with showing the community your work from the very beginning.  That being said, from an IP standpoint, it's yours.  There is no doubt.  You can prove it was your creation, I think you should copyright it and continue on.  You will never be able to prevent piracy 100%, but you can call people on it and you can discourage it.  Financially, you could take legal action if anyone used your work at this point, especially if they profited from it because you can show that they stole your idea.  Understandably, you may be very hesitant to go down that path.  The coding and balance issues would certainly be a hurdle, but as amazing as your work is, I have no doubt that you could find a dedicated few that could help you out with that, or even do it for you within your creative vision.

If you release it to us, then you release it to us.  I'm not going to beg or try to persuade you other than what I've said here, and I can respect your decision either way.  If I were in your place, I think I would honestly be torn on the whole issue.  Regardless, kudos, your work is absolutely amazing, and we'd love to see more, even if it does serve to make us sad that we'll never go to war with some of these ships.

"What do you imagine hell to be like? A forest of decay, empty and barren... a wasteland of fire and sulfur... a frozen effigy of endless spires? Hell is shaped by the dreams and nightmares of those it consumes. It is as vast as you can possibly imagine. Whatever your version of hell is... it exists. It longs for your arrival."

I saw some irony in that.

Anyways, I'm balls-deep into Act 2 of the video now, I rendered some stuff, rather messily if anything, which I am trying to work into the composition. I only have a handful of ingame stuff to do right now - three beam abilties (since I couldn't get aoe bolt-based abilities to not outright crash and just gave up), some staged recordings, and a lot of punching. Then I need to go back and get recordings to fill in the holes elsewhere, and hope that Mexican, Lavarinth, is able to roll in on time with some of the other CGI material I need.

If anything, any delays the project will have from my one-two week estimation will be due to render times. Those frames take anywhere from 3-5 minutes, so 500 frame scenes take... forever. My computer was built for this kind of work, but it's nowhere near enough to complete it in a timely fashion. Also, I'm not experienced enough to make most of the things I want to make. So right now I'm basically grasping at straws to fill in the blanks while I rally my last ingame material and spend hours upon hours of recording.

Ah, this is so close to being finished. I hope it will be up to your expectations. At this point the video is not really even a video anymore, more of a reflection of my inner conflict in trying to finish it.

/edit

I am on the final stretch of recording/ingame material for the composition now.

Oh, I plan to.

The total running time should be around 45-46 or so minutes. 46 minutes of explosions, dudes getting mad, and a little bit of lore thrown inbetween.

Currently I only have the Emperor and its related sequences to do, then I need to backtrack and fill some holes. Then I need CGI.

A modest expectation is a week now. Maybe less. As long as I don't slip into depression again this should be finished very, very soon.

Good.  If I can't play the ships (which I am still kind of miffed about), then I want to see them fighting and blowing each other up.

"...And now for something completely different."

IskatuMesk, If, after you're done with Black Sun, have nothing to do, I was wondering if you could help me with my Darkness mod by finishing the models Thomusin will give me.

Everyone wants to play models that you have had a hand in, so...

Please?

Quoting Thomusin,

"Well, i have some old models make year ago for something similar to your planned mod... it was for the dark race...

I have no time for finish these model... some have minor modeling error who need to be corrected, some are not yet with UV and only one is textured ( destructor )... use Vasari name for their function... if one of the model please you, i can upload it... once you have found a modeler, he can finish the job"

That's what Thomusin said about the models.

  Funny,  but I need a response.

and you need to be patient grasshopper.

Something for the road.

/e

I've run into serious difficulties in encoding the video. Currently clocking in 14 hours of encode time and no progress so far.

/e

I missed my release deadline due to constant encode issues. First of all, Fraps and Vegas 9.0d+ don't like each other very much. So, after that penis slapping contest and hours of wasted time, I had to acquire Vegas 11 32-bit and try that. The encodes were successful, but Vegas has its own stupid way of handling aspect ratio and can't just do it the same way everyone else does, so I wasted around 3 hours trying to fix that (which I still can't get perfect, I'll have to rescale via DAR in avisynth again). I managed two full encodes @ 10 hours a piece, but the first was mangled in quality and the second has color depth problems. Which means I need a third encode to fix a setting Vegas 11 reset to default (8-bit color looool) and then encode to x264 once again which will take like 1:30 hours at most. THEN I can verify the encode didn't break yet again. If it did I swear I will rip out my spleen and choke myself to death with it.

Vegas uses a single-threaded encode for some braindead idiotic reason, its GPU-accelerated encoding doesn't even work, and the mulithread option does jack shit. Megui encodes literally at 15-20x the speed Vegas does, on an external versus an internal, too! Horrible! Absolutely disgusting! Vegas has always been slow as lard when it comes to encoding but here it really shows just how bad it is.

Sigh. Well, if this encode works, the video should be up soon...

/e

The last encode was yet again a failure. The video makes it to the last 5 minutes then it's apparent that vegas still has issues with fraps files, as random parts of the battle have no video. The video as a whole... it's a bloody mess. I couldn't really assess the quality of the video until now, where I can finally view it in fullscreen. It's a disaster. I have served to do nothing but make a fool of myself once more.

Sigh...

I must re-encode again... I tried to fix some of the ugly areas but... I consider this project a failure. God knows if I'll ever be able to get a full encode that works properly in the first place.

/e 2

My next encode yet again has issues, this time immediately into it. A transition is entirely black in the encode, but fine in the preview. This bug has either become more complicated or the entire thing is hosed. Either way, this may not be possible to finish without some extremely painful monkeywork.

I identify a second major bug in the encode soon after.

No, I don't think this project is going to be finished any time soon. I think this will force me to drop it in the end. I don't think there's a real way to fix this.

/e 3

It is time to engage Operation: 69. I am going to reconvert all of the fraps files to Lagarith. I don't have the HD space for this operation. Yet. I must make it available. This means my other video productions will lose all of their content as I am about to delete it, and transfer my LP material off elsewhere.

The cost of this gamble will be immense.

/e 4

Operation: 69 is a total failure. Vegas randomly crashes during the encode. As I have taken fraps out of the equation, the only possible answer is that vegas' avi plugin is seriously hosed.

I don't know what to do. I don't think there is anything I can do. Short of rebuilding the composition from the ground up in After Effects, which would take months at best, I have no options left.

/e 5

A test yields that even if Vegas doesn't crash the bug remains anyways.

My time here is over. If I ever figure it out, I'll happily release the finished video. But as it stands, the video is finished but cannot be rendered. Black Sun is dead.

/e 6

This morning I decided to try one last, costly gamble in an effort to save this. I've decided to reinstall windows, on the premise that something became horribly mangled deep within its liver when I was having driver/codec issues in the past. This is truly a final, last ditch effort to save this.

/e 7

As one would expect, Operation: 42 was a failure. The culling of my other material, the reinstallation of windows, the week+ of nonstop encoding. Sitting, waiting, watching numbers tick by as Black Sun crashes into the ground over and over again... all for nothing. Both problems persist on a fresh windows installation. The random loss of video data, the random crashing. Everything I have attempted to do, from rendering the video in tiny little pieces, has had its own backfiring, from accelerated crashing to entire days of encoding crashing at the end of their progress.

Alas, it has come down to this. I have two full encodes of the video, each broken in their own way. It is time to don my robe and wizard hat, and smash this wreck with my gnarly wand a few times.

Know this: Although Black Sun itself is not really that notable or worthy of the time that has been invested into it, the fact I have stuck with it so far means more to me than anything. I have sworn never to give in to doubt or despair, and even when all that could go wrong has gone wrong, and even when I don't want to wake up to see that crash screen yet again, and even when I loathe to destroy so much for so little... this is the spirit of Black Sun. To never give in to that which speaks of destruction absolute. I have given up projects for the most trivial of things, and here is where I draw the line. No matter what it takes, this battle will be won.