News Displaying 11 to 20 of 85  The site has had a few tweaks and updates ...
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It works a little bit like a gravatar setup but it serves up some actual images from Star Fleet, based on a very simple algorithm. I found an X Bomber Encyclopaedia for sale here on yahoo auctions ...
It looks to be in a heck of a lot better condition than the last one that I saw: great for its age, in fact.
I've not seen any of the Showa sketch and colouring books in a good while.
I know that there are a couple of rarer ones that I don't have scans for on the website.  The Wand Company's TOS tricorder has been in the pipeline for a long time.
It got delayed with the 'global pandemic' and then they seemed to have a bit of a re-think about what the product should do.
In any event, it's close to getting released.
It's very rare that you see what I would call 'proper' merchandising for Star Trek, or for anything else, now.
Diamond Select, Master Replicas, NECA, Triforce have all either fallen by the wayside or long-since stopped doing replicas for anything: whether it be Star Trek, Halo, Portal, Gears of War etc.
The economics don't work anymore, unless it happens to be a really iconic item, and 3D printing has come along to fill the gap.
In the meantime though, X-Fighter Multiplayer is coming along ...
All four ships are now operable via whatever input devices you select in the options menu, which was something that I was originally happy to implement further down the line.
I planned to have it initially so that ship 1 was locked to keyboard and ship 2 was locked to controller 1, with ships 3 and 4 being AI, but that whole approach was going to make it complicated to get other things done with it.
Leelu has decided that the blue ship is 'her' ship, which is adorable.
Next areas of focus are: finishing off the weapons and the instrumentation.
The ships also require shields, as the X-Fighters are a bit too fragile at the moment.  As development on X-Fighter multiplayer moves along (a bit slowly), I have been watching some walkthroughs of the alpha demo of Jazz Jackrabbit 3: a game that Epic Megagames couldn't seem to manage to release.
.png) Done
- Fixed a little glitch in Wingblade's missile system
- Improve tank <-> turret matching logic
- Deathball logic improved
- Main menu ship preview logic improved
- Additional colour variants for Alliance construction drones ...
- Improvements to Skull player ship
Skull sprite scaled down 25%
Rear lasers - blue (Skull), green (Azuris)
- Player-2 ship: Sylph, undergoing major reconstruction ...
3x primary and secondary weapons:
Guns improved, lasers added
Guided missiles and positron beam added
Rear-firing guns
Improved instrumentation
Shields and afterburners
- Menu colour changeable via options menu
In Progress
- X-Fighter multiplayer prototype/alpha
- Improve assault tractor logic ...
- L16 - Grey heavy bombers with hoverfans and Minelayers
To-do
- Megacarriers
Implement green variant
Re-instate neutralaser weapon
Match deployed fighters to carrier
- L16 Boss - Death-X Transforming Type
Progress animations and weapons
- Various escape pod types with rotation
.png) I got back to working away at the X-Fighter multiplayer feature the last couple of days ...
For the game to understand what to do if a fighter hit point is destroyed, it had to know whether that player ship is enabled in the first place, and whether it's under AI or player control.
So I expanded the options menu so that this info can be set in the configuration file, and then the game can read that information back out.
So the 'prototype' of this multiplayer mode is probably going to be more fully-featured than I had in mind when I set off.
The options menu has had a few tweaks.
In the end, I want the options menu to integrated into the main menu, rather than it being a separate screen.
That would be very elegant.
I might give that a try in the following version.
I had a tweak on with the Fusion runtime's display and performance options and it runs very smoothly with vsync turned on, so that is enabled by default.
I'll put a hotkey on the main menu so that it can be turned off, in case it causes someone problems.  Things had been progressing quite well on the X-Fighter multiplayer front.
Because there are four times as many player ships that all need to do certain things, it's taking a while to make them do all the things they need to do.
Each of the four X-Fighters will also be able to respond to:
Player input,
AI control;
... as well as be disabled (ie. not appear, for increased difficulty).
My progress got a bit broken halfway through last week with personal issues, but things are looking better again now.
This will all push v0.84m back a bit because this little project wasn't going to form part of the update.
I just decided later, after working on the Sylph that it was going to happen.
Anyway, here's a picture of the megamorph blaster from Slugterra.
We've been enjoying that show a lot lately and I've been on a little bit of a collecting spree.
This toy is great: much better than the earlier ones.  To help with the testing of multiplayer, I made a very minor investment in this Sidewinder game controller from 2002, which, incidentally is when work on X-Bomber the Game started.
My Xbox One controller has a ludicrously big USB wireless adapter to make it work with Windows, although there is a smaller adapter that was released a bit later.
It was irritating: tweaking the game for 10-15mins, finding that the controller had powered itself off to save battery, powering it on, waiting for it to connect, restarting the game to make it detect the controller etc ...
The other thing is that the Xbox controller is a poor controller for playing shoot-em-ups in Windows.
The part of the controller that controls X/Y movement is the analogue stick on the left, which is not as fast as a direction pad and has a vague, wobbly feel to it.
The Xbox controller does have a d-pad but it presents itself in Windows as 4 fire buttons, which makes it useless.
At the same time, the triggers underneath present as rudders, so you can't map those as buttons either.
The shoulder buttons are actual buttons but they're in such an uncomfortable place that that doesn't really work either.
So, the old Sidewinder roasts it in all those areas and USB is just a lot less hassle.
This one was £1.65 on eBay, with it's packaging.
It looks like it's never been used.
So, if you have the urge to run X-Bomber in co-operative 2-player mode, then I suggest saving yourself some money and maybe getting one of these.
I once had the original version of this controller, which had the serial cable, rather than USB.
It was black rather than dark grey, with greyish-green buttons, rather than black ones.
There are one or two other slight differences as well but it brings back memories of playing Star Trek: Star Fleet Academy and Fury3 with the old one.
One thing that my daughter remarked about is that the packaging is "so cool", which is interesting and very true.
It's much more exciting than the bland, sterile and unimaginative packaging of Microsoft's current gaming hardware.  We're now well past half-way with X-Blogger's episode-by-episode review and analysis of Star Fleet.
The bumper-sized write-up of episode 16 is out today.
This is a very memorable episode and it's nice to see that other people have the same questions about certain 'plot holes' in the series that I have.
This episode was one in particular where there are mountains of unanswered questions, while certain statements were presented that you can't easily reconcile.
Episode 11 is another great episode that has similar sorts of questions around it.
Perhaps that's one thing that makes Star Fleet have such a lasting effect on people: that, along with the events that it shows you, it gives you a lot of mysteries and puzzles that can't readily be solved.
▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▱▱▱▱▱▱▱▱  I sometimes feel like an archaeologist when working on the site...
I went looking for some additional info on the Proteus and managed to track down the creator's site on the Wayback Machine, which turned up some very interesting additional details and material about the ship.
This was partly spurred on by the current work on X-Bomber's multiplayer mode, involving the X-Fighters featured in Revenge of Makara / Star Fleet Genesis.
The AS-5 bears a slight resemblance to what I imagine the X-Fighter to look like.
Plus, I came across this DeviantArt post, which shows that the site gets used for some things.
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