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The Game | Star Fleet | Other | Forum |
X-Bomber the GameIntroduction » Welcome to the home of X-Bomber the Game: a vertical-scrolling spaceshooter for Windows, based on the Japanese sci-fi TV series: Star Fleet It features lots of arcade action, weapons and explosions. News »Star Fleet in Look-In Ben's review of the Star Fleet Look-In comics has been expanded to 3 articles. Please find the links below: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
Game Content MigrationAll content regarding X-Bomber the Game itself has been moved to my home box. This way, all versions released since the very beginning of the project, 24 years ago, are now all accessible for download, in the same place, where anyone would expect to find them, rather than having to look for them on a different server, along with all source code for the game, and more gameplay videos than I was comfortable uploading to shared hosting. The Large File Area link, pointing to xbomber.com, which I am using to direct traffic to my home box, has been removed from the right-hand menu, which tidies things up there a bit. Additionally, I have been testing running phpBB on the home box for a number of weeks. I deployed a new phpBB with a database and a MariaDB user that mirrors the SFXB Forum deployment. Since I want to minimise resource wastage when running the site from a home server, it was essential to see if the AnubisBB phpBB extension would work on it as well. I got the sodium PHP extension enabled and AnubisBB ran great after that. This weekend, I exported the SFXB Forum database and the file structure across to the home box and, after a little bit of playing in PHPMyAdmin and data_global.php, I have a clone of the SFXB Forum running there happily behind the scenes. I have a little mail relay from Dynu set up to handle password reset and registration emails. In the meantime, the attackers seem to be starting to get the message that they will be getting nothing out of the SFXB forum whatsoever with AnubisBB standing in the way. Server CPU and bandwidth utilisation has seen a huge reduction, and is continuing to tail off. I don't plan to move the forum anywhere at the moment for a few reasons, but the migration of a copy of the forum database is needed to allow the final phases of migration of the site across to its intended new home.
X-Bomber TrailerI found an early trailer for X Bomber on nitter. As noted in the comments, the 17-second clip seems to be made up mostly of footage from the 'preview show' and looks to pre-date the airing of the show by quite a bit. The voice-over is apparently done by Yuji Mitsuya, who played PPA in the original Japanese version of the show. I have added the video file to the Star Fleet ยป Videos folder for safe keeping. At the same time, we have a nice, in-depth conversation going on about the show on the forum. It's good to see that getting quite a bit of use. It's an honour to host the forum, which I inherited from Andy at SFXB. Its continued availability is in no way contingent on its activity, but at the same time it's gratifying to see it not acting like a read-only resource.
SFXB Forum UpdatedThe Forum has been updated to the newest build. That means we can happily carry on with our Star Fleet re-watch. The developers at phpBB have done a great job of patching this and the upgrade mechanism is excellent these days. I added some nice new images from Paul Wilson of another X-Bomber created in No Man's Sky, which can create ships for the player in a quasi-AI, procedurally-generated way.
TwistedPinnacle3DI came across this interesting find on Etsy. I really like how these figures have different poses and carry different weapons that look authentic to the show. On a separate subject, the linking between the media and news parts of the site wasn't made to work across two domains.
Star Fleet Section MigrationThe Star Fleet section of the site has been replicated and switched over to being hosted on the downstairs PC. As a result, the 720p upscaled DVD rips of Star Fleet have been moved from the large file area to here, which is where it would have made sense for them to have been since the outset. Getting all the Star Fleet data was a bit of a procedure and had to be done in two stages.
New ProjectHi All,
Evolution Dai-X Instructions.jpg) I had a request come in from Dan at the SFFB to see if I could get a scan of the instructions for the 2014 Evolution Toys Dai-X figure. This is a very clever idea because it clearly should be on the site, but it had never dawned on me to scan it. This is a new, straighter version from just after the scanner plate got a good clean.
Daft Ideas I received some very interesting information from Daft_Ideas (aka. Grey Area) about the history of the available X-Bomber 3D models, and the people that were involved in making them: Daft_Ideas created the model that Dan used as his template and which Nick Cass took further and developed as well. I've summarised part of one of Daft's emails: It was nice of Dan to credit me, and I feel proud that my simple model (I am in no way a designer!) started off this craze...well - there were two predecessors, on opposite ends of the scale; one by Dorian Sherratt who I fear may have passed away (his model was beautiful), and the simpler "benheu" version. I found some links and now that I have a much better printer (my first prints were on an ANet A8!) I've decided to spend some time on it again; but since I can't go "Better" than Gary or Dan's version, I have only one choice. I'm going bigger. I included here on the site some screengrabs of Daft's current work on X-Bomber and Dai-X.
AnubisBB I did quite a bit of testing over the last couple of days. I set up a test phpBB on XAMPP and enabled the sodium PHP extension, so that I could test out AnubisBB, which is an anti-DDoS extension for the SFXB Forum. After the tests there were nice and successful, I've applied the extension to the SFXB Forum. The number of bots went from about 700/800 down to zero. The original number of bots would've been much higher if not for a huge .htaccess file that was blocking entire provider networks and countries. Anyone that's not logged into the forum already will see a yellow screen for a few seconds with a little anime character, where it runs some calculations in javascript and returns the results to the server to filter out "headless browsers", before they get forwarded onto the forum. The solution needs javascript enabled to work, but this way, the forum will stay up reliably, and not be writing GBs of entries into the database sessions table and the server logs.
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