Site Info

Introduction

xbomber.co.uk v9.8 is the home of X-Bomber the Game. It seems to have expanded in recent years to host a large collection of Star Fleet / X-Bomber material and fan artwork.

The website is driven by PHP and MySQL.
It makes use of the PHP application; SLIR to resize images and the JavaScript Lightbox 2 to display images.
The site serves HTML 4.01 Transitional with CSS 2.1 and embedded fonts.
The site uses no cookies.

Projects

2015 - SFXB Forum Move and Conversion

Ikonboard SFXB Forum

In Jan 2015, the SFXB forum encountered a software problem. So we moved the data to xbomber.co.uk and did a custom migration from Ikonboard to phpBB3.
Thanks to Andy Thomas for his help on the project, which was completed on 22nd Feb 2015.

More info is available on the forum.

2014 - Move back to Krystal Hosting

Peter Lewis hosted us on Gibbering.net since 2007. This made looking after the website a lot simpler and let me focus on some technical aspects of the game. 
Because of the amount of disk space and bandwidth available, I was also able to make much more content available online.
Peter supported me a lot in 2008 when the project encountered legal problems.

In March 2014, Dreamhost deleted Peter's data and hiked the cost of his renewal.
So, I uploaded the file structures and database for xbomber.co.uk and bigdaix.co.uk to Krystal Hosting in the UK.

Stewart Dalzell at Krystal Hosting was very helpful and installed a custom php.ini to get the SLIR image resizer working.

2012 - Media System

Images - Version 1

Before the Media system was completed, images and other files were displayed in the following locations:
	- within in the xbomber.co.uk website
	- the Coppermine-driven X-Archive collaborative gallery
	- ImageVue X2-driven X-Bomber the Game screenshot gallery

Each of the above locations had their own, separate file structure.
They had no consistent layout or appearance and no integration. Administration of the different systems was time-consuming. 

The content from the above structures was merged and the Media system was written in PHP to index the content and display it within the xbomber.co.uk website.
With the Media system, large amounts of content can be uploaded over FTP and the system takes care of the rest. 
The system was completed in October 2012, marking the release of v9 of the website.

Thanks to Lord Ri for his help with creating the system. It took that and a lot of visits to Stack Exchange to get the thing working.

The Media system was originally known as Images. It became known as Media when its functionality was expanded to index the website's gameplay videos in December 2012.

ImageVue X2 Gallery

Coppermine X-Archive Gallery

2014 - Disappearance of Big Dai-X

Shane Perry's Big Dai-X website

In Nov 2007, Shane Perry re-created the Big Dai-X website under the domain bigdaix.co.uk, after the site went missing from bigdaix.com towards the end of 2004.
Thanks to our hosting situation with Peter and Dreamhost, the site was hosted on the same server as xbomber.co.uk.

In late 2013, the bigdaix domain name expired. 
Since the files were safe on the server, but were inaccessible without the domain name, I decided to integrate the content (with acknowledgments) into the Star Fleet section of xbomber.co.uk so that everything could be accessed from a single menu system.
The integration was completed on 20th June.

Previous Locations

Originally, the X-Bomber Game Project had a single page on my site at piersbell.tripod.com, (back in 2002, when people had homepages).

Once the project expanded and the game was released, within the space of about 18 months, the game's website was hosted in the following locations as I was trying to get as much bandwidth and flexibility as possible for free and with a minimum number of adverts:

	2003.02.14	xbomber.tripod.com
	2003.05.06	v1 - members.lycos.co.uk/xbomber
	2003.06.03	v2 - www16.brinkster.com/xbomber
	2003.10.31	v3 - btinternet.com/~xbomber

On 16th December 2003, xbomber.co.uk went up, featuring version 4 of the site. This featured a left navigation bar, used frames and was hosted by Krystal hosting.

Site History

2004.05.07	v5 - Complex frameset, Left menu, Menalto Gallery

2005.01.27	Shoutbox and CMS
2006.01.10	v6.5 - frameset, top menu, + Greymatter CMS
2006.04.08	v7 - iFrame, left menu, rebuilt and simplified
2006.09.14	v8 - PHP, top menu, download details iFrame,
		new forum provided by SFXB

2007.11.16	Move to Dreamhost, left menu

2009.04.08	Previous Versions and Source Code (PVSC) upload completed
2009.06.06	v8.6 - top menu, ImageVue X2 gallery, increased security, PVSC
2010.01.08	X-Archive Coppermine Gallery
2010.05.26	CuteNews CMS
2010.12.03	uploaded Star Fleet and X-Bomber screenshot packs
2010.12.31	Improved layout and CuteNews UTF-8 9 CMS with Captcha

2011.07.06	Version control database w/ source code
2011.09.06	Own CMS; based on MySQL and PHP

2013.04.21	Error handling improved
2013.06.29	Replaced Screenshot Packs (total 3GB) with Star Fleet Galleries
		 - Started creating detailed version history
2014.04.01	Move to Krystal Hosting, Media indexes sub-folders
2014.06.20	Layout and readability improved, 
2014.10.19	Media gets bigger thumbnails, clearer navigation/layout, 
		separation of media files and downloads
2014.12.04	High score uploads unblocked, Site menu reconfigured

2017.11.19	Improvements to the website's handling of very large images.

About Menu

High Scores
Version History

About
Level 16 Mid-level Boss
To Do List
Project History
Site Info
Contact and Links

Help Topics

Getting Started
Gameplay
X-Project Player Ships
Extra Player Ships
Special Weapons
Allies
Enemies

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