News

I started work on the "high-security area" of X-Bomber's last level, where the mission-critical VIP is imprisoned.
This is what the huge mid-level boss is guarding.

This will be a more complex and even better-defended version of the Alliance base that you encounter in levels 3 and 11.
I went back to the *Giant Sketchbook of X-Bomber the Game* to see if I'd drawn a layout for this version, but apparently I hadn't.

So, I mapped it out with a sharpie on some graphing paper.
This version will have twice as much everything; shield generators, turrets, beam cannons and missile launchers.

It may amaze many, including myself, but I am back to working on X-Bomber the Game.

As you can see, this time, I let the X-Bomber ship do most of the playtesting.

The last 3 evenings, I have been working on 3 new sections of the last level; the Space Fortress:
 - Cargo block exchange (graphics upgraded, pictured)
 - Drone storage hall
 - 'Deathballs on rails'
The logic for the attack drone launchers was a bit of a challenge until I found a way to cheat it.

I also did a bit of work on the L16 main boss sprite, enemy weapons sprites and raked out and streamlined the logic for object ordering, plus a few other little things.

The plan here is to put an update up every Wednesday and I want to see if I can provide a new release by the end of the month.

The Dai-X is getting back to action.  😃

I doodled the combat cruiser from Gerry Anderson's Firestorm on a post it note.
It turned out okay so I shoved it through Photoshop.

Here's an old outline of an early layout for the Dai-X's booster in X-Bomber the Game.
I shaded it and gave it some more greebles.

People may well have come across these photos of this Japanese Starlog magazine poster, featuring, well,  pretty-much-everything from the show ...

I used to think that this was from a separate issue of the magazine to the black-and-white Dai-X cutaway, but reading between the lines on these tweets from Re93679621 makes me think that this might've been the opposite side of the same poster, or at least included in the same issue.

https://twitter.com/Re93679621/status/1135483271788109824
https://twitter.com/Re93679621/status/1180059596674588672

If any Star Fleet fans know any more about it, give me a shout in the comments.
Anyway, you can see a lot of scans that I've accumulated from different places of the Starlog and Televi magazine features at:
https://xbomber.co.uk/?dir=Star+Fleet%2FArticles+and+Scans%2FStarlog+and+Televi-kun

When I was clearing out my old rubbish, I found the PADD that I made when TNG was on BBC2 back in the 90s.
I did the graphics in a publishing package by Sierra that we had on a Win 95 toaster.  It got printed on photocard and wrapped around ... a small chopping board or something that had the right rounded corners.
What I had for reference was a TNG trading card with a fuzzy photo of the prop since ... there was no internet.
Anyway, it was kinda-not-in-great-shape-anymore so it got binned, but not before I fed it thru the V750 Pro and fixed it a bit in Photoshop.

For my walkthrough of Terminal Velocity; forerunner of Fury3, I wanted screenshots from the game's cutscenes.
Unfortunately, unlike Fury3, whose cutscenes are in AVI format, TV has video files which I can't open in any application other than the game itself.

So I found a great application called Screenshotter, which generates timed-interval screengrabs in a range of image formats. You can have it capture a specific monitor or even a specific window.  It also has a logic that suspends the capture when it senses that less than a certain number of pixels since the last capture.

I let this thing run while I triggered off the cutscenes one-after-another from the game's hidden video interface menu.

Watched Star Trek: Enterprise a little while ago...  This may not be a popular opinion but I thought it was a good series of Star Trek, albeit with a few rather annoying problems.
It was action-packed and the tone was at least sufficiently idealistic that it felt like a believable half-way point between the modern day and the 23rd Century.

Anyway, around that same time, I pulled out an old art asylum phase pistol (they blew one of these up as a prop in the show, to illustrate the overload feature without destroying an original prop).

They made the muzzle bright orange on these, which totally killed any sense of realism, so I took some Gundam paint and oil markers to colour the muzzle silver, colour the pins at the front bronze where the top cover hinges, and weather and dirty it down, so that it looked a bit more credible.

I spent a slightly hair-raising few hours this week trying to bring Emilee; my triforce Gears of War pistol back to a more presentable condition after its accident in December.
I went at it with some model glue, the metallic t-cut for my Forester and a GM20 gundam oil marker.
It's not perfect because a lot of the cracks in the polystone were quite complex but it's a damn side sweeter than paying $2,000 (!!!) + shipping + duty for a mint boxed replacement.

2019.12.22 | 19:00:

My Gears of War snub pistol; Emilee (it had a name) somehow dropped off its shelf and landed on my desk this morning.
It is now in significantly-less-than mint condition and all the suppliers are dry on stock and I can't seem to find a replacement anywhere.
If anyone has any idea where I might dig up a mint boxed Triforce snub pistol, maybe you could shoot me a quick message.