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X-Bomber the GameIntroduction ».png) 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 »
Next StepsHi All, I'm back from travelling about, the last few weeks. The site seems to have survived well on the home server over that time. I was able to use a lot of different networks to test the parts of the site that are hosted from home (which is most of them) and it runs pretty quickly. In synthetic tests, the upper end of the range of performance values overlaps the lower end of the spread of values that you get from Krystal. Sustained download speeds are comparable between the two sources as well. I took a Windows toughpad with me on my journeys, so that I could remote desktop into the server in case anything needed restarting or reconfiguring. At one hotel, they were having some trouble with the fuses and two phone chargers burned out as well as the power adapter for the toughpad. The hotel management and maintenance people were nice enough to get me a new toughpad charger delivered next-day by scamazon. Once everything to do with the X-Bomber site is handed off to my home machine, the integration between the site and the forum will run into difficulty and will probably need to be commented out. It's not possible to share data between the servers without disabling a lot of security features that nobody should turn off. The forum probably can't be moved in the near future because, even with Anubis enabled, the botnets that have attacked it for years still create a measurable CPU workload and chew up a lot of bandwidth. I think it makes sense to have the workloads on two separate servers for now. Once we have a whole site running off one server, I have a big backlog of Star Fleet material to add.
Star Fleet in Look-In Ben's review of the Star Fleet Look-In comics has been expanded with 2 further articles. Please find the links below: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
New SFA/XB1 Super PackI have been finishing the consolidation of the erstwhile 'large file area' with the Game section of the site. All game installers and executables are available together in the Releases folder. The source code files have been archived together to help the downloads page to keep track of the files. This has led to a bit of a reduction of the footprint on the server. The earlier Multimedia Fusion files compress quite well, but with the later MFA files, 7-Zip doesn't manage as good a compression ratio. There may be a certain amount of compression inside the MFA files as it is, which leaves 7zip with little to do. They have all been archived as .zip, since 7-Zip's zip compression method is so good anyway that there wasn't a big enough benefit in archiving them as .7z. As part of tidying up the Releases folder, I made a new Super Pack for Star Fleet Arcade and XB1, which now includes the contents of the original installer packages as well as the extracted binaries. This might be fun if you wanted to see where X-Bomber the Game started out, way back in 2002. The Super Pack has been around for many, many years, but the new one is even more comprehensive. It has now been over a year since the last release of X-Bomber the Game. Once I've had a bit of a rest over the coming weeks, I'm looking forward to bringing the fight back to the Alliance and getting X-Bomber v0.84n finished and released.
Robot WarsDue to a lack of anything new worth watching, I started watching the 'new' 2016-2018 Robot Wars. One thing you notice is how much faster, more deliberate and more destructive the robots were, 13 years on from the end of the original 1997-2003 Robot Wars. That being said, the new show is strangely charmless compared to the original. In the current, American Battlebots incarnation of Robot Wars, you may be struck by the sheer scale of corporate sponsorship and enormity of the resources that go into most of the new robots. One machine even had AMD sponsorship. There is a colossal playlist on youtube with all episodes of the original show. The other thing that sets the new and original shows apart is that the original show has some good music that really sets the pace. I particularly like Road to Armageddon and the Battle Theme.
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 Trailer I 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 » 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 Updated The 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.
TwistedPinnacle3D Here are some great miniatures of the termoid soldiers, as well as Captain Orion, done by TwistedPinnacle3D. Amazingly, each of the figures have a different pose and carry different weapons: many of which at least look to be very accurate to what I remember from the show. I 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,
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This site and content is unofficial; © 2002-2026 Piers Bell and other authors. Star Fleet, X-Bomber et al. © Enoki Films. |
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