News On the twitter page of user: LunoriqreZX, I found a banner image that seemed familiar.
It took me a while to place it, but it is clearly an enlarged still version of Dorian Sherratt's animation of X-Bomber leaving its hangar on the Moon.
I had to screengrab the image, since it wouldn't allow me to download it any other way, oddly.
I went back to Dorian's deviantArt page to see whether it had ever been uploaded there.
His profile is now inactive and I found the below tragic and very sobering information. X-Bomber's documentation is getting a major overhaul, although it is still nowhere near finished.
The manual will be condensed into a single document that will be very comprehensive.
It will also serve as a behind-the-scenes guide.
I tweaked Brad's image of the Impala Cruiser, which appears a good bit in the game to make it fit in with the other images. X-Bomber Original Player Ship
(Closer in some ways to the one in the show)
- Pulse-fire neck lasers with additional sound effect, kindly provided by BladeZ
- Dai-X - Yellow x-tracer (ep19)
- Dai-X - Chest cannons revised
- Dai-X New mega missile detonation mode (spiral incendiary)
General
- Clickteam Fusion runtime updated from 293.10 to 295.10
- Player searchlights (for night mode etc.) implemented
- X-Bomber crew no longer chatter when playing as The Skull
- 'Points of interest' objects improved
Player Weapons
- New chest cannon mode for default Dai-X (high-velocity homing)
- Dai-X pulse gun reverted to v0.84e configuration (more accurate to show), as well as primary weapon cycling behaviour
- Braincom vulcan guns and cluster bombs revised
- Graphical bug fixed on Quantum Blaster special weapon charge particle effect
- Interesting positioning/graphical glitch fixed on ODIN/THOR boosters
Mission-specific
- L6-10 - Glitch with X-Bomber pulse gun muzzle flash colour fixed
- L6 - FG hologram effects further improved
- L15 - Battlecruiser shield overlay
- L16 - Reactor beam weapons fixed, core sprite added
Mission Briefings
- Solar system map generates faster
- Interesting glitch with map labelling fixed
- Adding further DVD screengrab images to mission briefings ...
Main Menu
- Ship selector in main menu displays images of player ships
- Main menu mini-map looks a bit more map-like
Objectives
- Re-work quantum blaster unselected/beam mode This week was the last week of our company's based office by the beach.
I handed the keys back to the owners on Thursday.
So long, old girl, and thanks for all the fish, It has come to my attention that the BBC is actually doing something useful and releasing Blake's 7 on blu-ray.
The set also has the optional inclusion of re-done practical special effects, which will be interesting to see ...
Blake's 7: The Collection - Series 1 - HMV ... that don't fit in the release notes.
This morning, I managed to get a neat feature working that was a little tricky to implement ...
To make the Default and Original versions of the X-Bomber/Dai-X player ships a bit more different to eachother, I took the opportunity to build in a feature that I'd wanted to put in for some time.
The diagram of Dai-X that you see in the Fabulous Films and Starlog magazine articles shows that Dai-X's chest cannons are really supposed to be multi-cell missile launchers, which is not quite the way they come across in the show.
When they are eventually used in the last episode, they fire like a giant shotgun or a grenade launcher, which is how I tried to make them work in the game until now.
This mode has been updated for v0.84j and kept for the 'Original' mode Dai-X.
The default Dai-X has been upgraded and now fires a quick salvo of 8 very small, guided missiles from each of the two chest launchers.
The missiles are not very powerful but they are very fast and home in well.
It makes Dai-X a slightly more interesting proposition for the player because its built-in weapons have been a bit lacklustre, compared to X-Bomber, even though they are pretty close to what's in the show.
I modelled this feature on the very satisfying player missile attack in Cloudphobia, which is a beautiful shooter that you can get on Steam, and it works in quite a similar way.
My next job is to give 'Original' Dai-X a different main missile attack, where, up until the missile detonates, it will behave just like it always has, but rather than detonating into a large, glowing fireball, (it is intended to be a small tactical nuke), the new one will release some submunitions that will spiral outward and create a lot of incendiary explosions: like I remember from a great old game called Firecrow, which you can freely enjoy.
Update
New mega-missile is now complete and it works great.
I now need to polish the HUD changes for Prototype X-Bomber and tweak the new X-Tracer a bit. I found this very stylish illustration on a site called twoucan, which is essentially a twitter image aggregator. Twitter user: Yoshihito Kobayashi posted some images of a nice Japanese X Bomber picture book that I've not come across.
Illustrations are apparently done by Hiroshi Kida and are often a composite of an illustrated background and a photograph of one of the ships from the show.
That illustration with the battlecruiser and the exploding volcano is pretty close to the Molthane episode.
The smaller booklet is thought to have accompanied one of the small Yujin-style, vinyl figures that were released at the time of the show. Interestingly, it lists the ages of the characters. Adding the new PlanetStyles theme to the SFXB forum got me thinking about my SFXBsilver theme that got somehow mangled during a softaculous upgrade in 2022, and the loss of the original Network54 SFXB forum.
It led me to want to do a write-up on the evolution of the SFXB forum, which has turned into a bit of a love letter to various forums that have had a connection to the development of X-Bomber the Game.
This little project turned into quite an undertaking and a work of reconstruction: merging Wayback archive snapshots that were missing a lot of stylesheets and images with elements that I was able to restore from my backup archives, so as to allow the article to have some accurate screenshots for illustration.
The Wayback Machine is a great resource, without which, it wouldn't have been possible to produce this little document to illustrate the efforts that lots of people have gone to in keeping the Star Fleet memory alive online.
I found an article on the propaganda outlet: Forbes' website which went into the funding of Terrahawks ...
That led me onto a very interesting gallery on archive.org, containing the pages of a production booklet for a Japanese anime show called Terrahawks that obviously never came into being.
As you can see from the information contained, it was substantially different to the Supermacromation series that was eventually produced in the West.
Interestingly enough, rather than Zelda having a space city, it's actually the Terrahawks who operate from the space city (which itself was called Terrahawk).
The fascinating premise of the show is that the Terrahawks would have apparently been fighting to recapture Earth from a plague of mutants cooked up by the United Nations.
Criminally, no mention was made of Firestorm in the article.
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