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 »  Thanks to everyone that joined the Star Fleet Teams call last night.
Unfortunately, the call was quite a bit disrupted due to incompetence on the part of the organiser.
Thanks to all those that were able to stay in the lobby to *eventually* join the call.
I have added two trusted friends of the site as "owners" of the group, who should be able to admit anyone into the call in future, in case we ever have a similar occurrence, which we won't.
Off the back of the discussion, the DVD AI Upscale page has been a little updated to link to more information about the upscale process by dym2005 and later by Spoutnik.
In a less recent update to that page, links to download the series from the 'large file area' were added.
If anyone has any suggestions for a catchier name for it, then I would be keen to hear them.  I had to take Krystal: the downstairs box, down for a few hours last night to move it across to a new case.
The previous case was an Aerocool DS200, which was a good and useful chassis, but the soft touch rubber coating on the exterior had deteriorated.
I wanted a white case for the lounge with a glass panel, rather than just the acrylic window.
It is remarkably difficult to find a chassis now that has an optical drive bay in the front (this Fractal Pop XL has two stunningly enough) and takes more than two 3.5" disks.
This chassis takes four in theory, but you lose one mount point for each optical drive bay that's occupied.
While moving the drives across I managed to break the SATA connector on one of the WD Blues.
I found a repair service where they replace the SATA connector on the drive. I will see if it's any good.
The cost of an 8TB WD Blue is £100 more now than what it was 4 years ago, which is not a great sign for current economic and technical development.  I decided to expand the use of the site's new method of thumbnailing gallery pages to cover GIF images.
After that, I tested it on PNGs and found that even before the thumbnails had been generated and cached, it was creating them and loading the page faster than with SLIR.
JPEG images are also being done via the new method and, with that, all gallery page thumbnails are being handled by the site itself.
The image loading speeds are much improved. If I'd known how fast it was by comparison, I would have pressed on with it before now.
Because this method creates a pool of thumbnails for each folder, for practically all image types (JPEG, PNG, GIF, WEBP and AVIF), folder preview now works, even when there are only non-JPEG/PNG/GIF images in the folder, which was a limitation before.
Because the site generates the thumbnails at 418 pixels wide and shrinks them down to 209px width, the thumbnails are nice and sharp on displays with >100% display scaling.
I found a bug with the folder preview, where, if the file name included a single quote in the filename, it would break the style element in the HTML that makes it display.
That's now fixed.
One nice thing about the Sphider search feature on the site, as it relates to this, is that it meanders through the site every hour and, if the thumbnails need to be regenerated for whatever reason, it means that the search process will trigger thumbnail regeneration across the site without anyone having to go and visit those pages beforehand.
Now that SLIR is being used much less, I might be able to reclaim some space by clearing out its cache.  This is an interesting Star Fleet fan illustration by Ricardo Andrade.
I don't think I've ever seen a Star Fleet fan artwork done in this style before.
I would be interested to know how it was done. It looks to be a traditional painting.
It's interesting how some fan artworks focus on the machines and action from the show and some focus on the human character aspect like this one.  I found this illustration of Dai-X by Jerry Bennett, who did this for a friend of his.
Very nice style, would be good to see some more of this - maybe even a colour version.  I found this article from Anime Network UK over Nitter which talks about Miniarts' X-Bomber model, which looks really nice.
They now do it in the beige/brown colours that the studio model was actually painted in, or in the white and grey, as it appeared under the show's blue lighting (and how it was presented at the 2022 Expo in Tokyo).
Miniart's eBay listings also show that it's available in two scales.  This illustration of Commander Makara is by Go Nagai and features in the Go Nagai Fan Club Associate Magazine "Makai Tsuushin" (Demon Realm Communications).
The fan club was formed in 1970 and issued a number of publications alongside Makai Tsuushin.
The Makara illustration features in the December 31, 1979 instalment (S54).
You can find a lot more information as well as lots of nice images on this page of the Go Nagai and the World of BBR site (mazingerz.com).
There is something slightly screwy about the JPG image of Makara from the above website.
PHP won't resize it and Photoshop won't open it either, so I copied and re-saved it as PNG.  Thanks to Keith Martin for sending me some nice shots of the production images from the X-Bomber Exhibition 2022 Pictorial Record,
I see that this book that was made as a companion to the 2022 Exhibition in Tokyo is still available for sale.
One day, I might do some scans from the book to expand the site's behind-the-scenes images.
With the book still being available from GoodSmile, I'm not in a hurry to scan anything from this book at the moment. I checked on the site last night and lo-and-behold, the entire site was down due to a new type of DDoS attack against the forum.
This time, the requests have been coming from all-over such as the United States, Mexico and Saudia Arabia.
There didn't seem to be as many individual user agents, so they managed to get under the 500-user ceiling that's set on phpBB, but those fewer endpoints seemed to be creating more requests with more demanding queries.
According to phpBB's own forum, we aren't the only people to be honoured with this special treatment.
The thing that seems to solve the problem best is just to play cat and mouse and move the URL path of the forum around so that the bots just receive a 404 error.
I have written my own little 'viewtopic.php' script in the original location so that real users can be forwarded from static links on gallery/media pages to topics on the forum in their new location.
In Other News
The news system icons have been adjusted to match the colours of the site.  I came across this interesting article on Sixties City, which is a fascinating site: a real labour of love by its creator.
This article lists the later Gerry Anderson productions - some of which made it all the way to fruition, while some didn't.
What I found very interesting was the 1984 T-Force attempt to reboot Thunderbirds.
In particular, the base was a huge carrier sub.
While we never got to see this in connection with anything to do with Thunderbirds, I like how the idea was held onto and used later on in Firestorm with the Ocean Storm, which is a similar, huge carrier sub, but which is also a bit tidier, more streamlined and less sprawling than the concept shown on this page.
Navigation
|
- Highest
- v0.84mrrtsks
652399
- Newest
- v0.84mrrtsksret
48501
Late to the Moderoid / Good Smile Dai-X, and then the Imperial Master stopped by - it's been a surreal day!
Late to the Moderoid / Good Smile Dai-X, and then the Imperial Master stopped by - it's been a surreal day!
Late to the Moderoid / Good Smile Dai-X, and then the Imperial Master stopped by - it's been a surreal day!
Late to the Moderoid / Good Smile Dai-X, and then the Imperial Master stopped by - it's been a surreal day!
Late to the Moderoid / Good Smile Dai-X, and then the Imperial Master stopped by - it's been a surreal day!
Merry Festivities and Fixes!
Merry Festivities and Fixes!
An actual Star Fleet video from me, it's been a minute!
Quick Links
Contact
Large File Area
Links
Article list
Star Fleet Teams
Theme Select
|
.png)
0
0 comments
Start a forum discussion.