X-Bomber v0.6, v0.52 and v0.48

[Son Of Chronos]

Hmm interesting stuff you got there, I was just on your site and came across the article from sci-fiNow that you have scanned up there.Im curious why on earth did enoki films ask you to stop making this game, the excuse in the mag seems unture, Go nagai was unhappy with it, I doubt he even knew of it, it seems they had no grounds to stop you as you still are doing the game.Im just asking because in the future I wouldnt mind making a game or a few other projects all free and for fans of course.You would think they would be happy a few of us keep starfleets name alive in some way, rather than trying to shut us down.

[Crash]

Well it was shortly before they released the DVDs and I received an email from the UK publishers telling me how unhappy Go Nagai was about my game.I rang up the UK people and was told how the Japanese had been gleefully scouring the internet for anything that could hurt the DVD release. The guy I spoke to then threatened legal action.I honestly think it's nonsense that Go Nagai would be miffed about the game - he was just fond of his show and happy that it was such a big hit in the UK. So I think that part may have been a lie. I think Enoki and co made that up.I just want to thank everyone here again for helping me out in fighting Fabulous Films and Enoki Films. I owe Andy and Shane, and my awesome webhoster Pete and a lot of other fans and friends from all sorts of backgrounds (ie. coding and fangame production) for helping me out by writing a torrent of emails protesting Enoki's position, when many people somehow felt I was in the wrong or just didn't have the backbone to support X-Bomber (i.e. Clickteam).It's all over now - there's no trouble brewing for anyone writing any fan material on Star Fleet now that the DVDs are out.I did email Enoki to try and make peace with them in January but they didn't really reply.These should give you an idea of what went on:...http://www.xbomber.co.uk/?page=6http:// ... 236665This year we've had a lot of trouble with someone hacking the xbomber.co.uk site.The files that were always damaged were the emails and write-ups about Enoki and the attacks started about 2 days after I received the first takedown email.

[Son Of Chronos]

WOW man I just read the whole back story(cheers for the links), what alot you went through man.Many good points were raised.Indeed it seems they only through a fit because the DVD was comming out, you've been working on the game many years before anybody knew about any DVD, without a doubt without its release nobody would care about your game to want to shut it down.I mean its been almost 30 years and you just get contacted when the DVD is comming, yeah its pretty obvious.Even the fact without your efforts and fans alike along with this very site itself nobody would even remember what StafFleet is never mind a DVD release, it would just be totally forgotten.If not for this site I wouldnt have known or bought the DVD, not once have I been into a DVD store and seen it anywhere, in the same way an old fan might come across your game and say hey yeah i remember this show, and go and look for more info for it, and come across the DVD etc.Someone mentioned Chrono trigger 3D fanmade project that got shut down, yes I remember when that happend, but you see the Chrono series is still very much an active franchise for Square Enix, im pretty sure theirs recent mangas of it and a version of the game appeared on the DS, that should be enough to tell you how upto date it was.Will we see a Starfleet game on the DS?, hmmmm, something tells me not, their has been nothing offical for Starfleet since it finished airing in what 1985? untill the DVD 2009, everything in that time has been fan driven, I dont know any other show where the fans alone have kept the memory of the show alive, for that long.I am very dissapointed by Go nagai's reaction to a fan project and general fans(this is if its even true, which I doubt) maybe the commercial failure of the show brings back bad memories for him or something, I dont know, as his involement in this was very vague, and I find it hard to picture any creator of anything hating fans for loving their work so much they would devote time into making something that captivated their minds, even more so if the show did not do successful.It reminded me of something that happend to me, I used to do designs and this guy came to me to help on his ideas, he had already designed the character in question, and need me to draw different version of him in more styles, anyway he ended up not using any of my stuff.I then a few months later made a website of my work, i decicded to included that picture, long story short that guy somehow found out about my website and saw the picture and thought i was claiming it as my own( i wasnt) the next time I saw him he wanted to hurt me and threatend to sue me, im not joking i think if his father had not been around to talk things sensible we would of had a fight, anyway that taught me a big lesson.Thats a pity about the hacking, it seems someone wants to cover their tracks and what was said to you, let me guess its stopped right about after the DVD was released ?5-10 years from now there will be even less StarFleet fans as we all go off into the sunset and the companies should be happy that we kept the name going long enough for it to get a DVD release and for them to make a profit off it, something I bet not one fan has ever got.I must say it has put me off  aliltle bit doing my SF projects that I had few ideas for, even though its not something that would happen for another 2 years if at all, although you going through this shows other fans they can still do what they want(within reason as long as they follow your same kind of path i.e no profit or selling stuff.The only offical thing left for StarFleet is the soundtrack which seems to have fell off the face of the earth, such a thing would probably sell far less than the DVD's, i doubt they would make any noise if any, whenever that comes, I dont see it comming out anymore  anyway and if it does it will be some small itune type release, to save on packaging.Anyway crash glad you got through this mess and good luck with the rest of your game.

[Crash]

I totally agree - I think the UK distributors recognised that they were being asked to attack their own side. I think it came straight from Enoki, trying to make a fast buck at any expense. I think he made up the bit about Go Nagai to give his demands some weight. The impression I got from the interview on the DVD Boxset was of a totally different person who was just glad that it'd found a proper audience in the UK.Amazing about your run-in with this chump - Unreasonable people are a hazard that you sometimes bump into. Once they latch on they're hard to get rid of.I wouldn't let it put you off. Presumably we're both in the UK and they're in the US. I would just get on with whatever you want to do.As far as I know the hacking never stopped. Around the start of June I reprogrammed the site to include only pages that were listed within the index.php. This stopped any unforseen arguments being fed via the page URL and stopped any damaging code being executed on the server. After the first time the attacks all took place on the 26th of each month.I was certainly upset when it happened. I'd not long been back from Germany and one of the University lecturers had rented and wrecked my house, taken me to court for the deposit and started stealing my identity. (Never come to St-Andrews). So I was fighting a battle on several fronts for quite some time.I've emailed the address I have for the people working on the soundtrack earlier today. We'll see if anything comes back. I thought I'd see if there was anything I could do to speed up the release.

[Son Of Chronos]

what the hell thats crazy stuff about your lecturer, no wonder you was under pressure at the time with all that going on.Perhaps this hacking is not releated to Starfleet? rather someone else with a grudge against you maybe?Yeah that guy I dealt with just opened my eyes in the fact that people can turn for the littlest reason, I dont do designs anymore, but if i did id be very picky with who I work with and certainly some kind of contracts would have to be made, so from day 1 everyone knows the score.You know i emailed(I believe it was the right email anyway) the soundtrack people about a month ago, and ive heard nothing, maybe because im just some random guy they ignored it, even though i was quite clear in what and why i was sending them an email in the first place.Maybe you will have more luck, it would be better it gets released sooner rather than later as the purchase of the DVDs is still fresh in peoples minds, they should aim to catch people still on the hype train, the activity on the site is already a sign that people are moving on, i just dont want the soundtrack to do poor really.

[Crash]

I know just how you feel. I haven't had a response to my email either and they've had all week.It'd be heartbreaking to think the plug's been pulled on the soundtrack but I think the probability of it being released soon is fading away. I just hope Andy or someone has some inside info on it.I would email fabulous films to see if they know anything but given our relationship...

[Shane]

I must confess I hadn't got around to downloading the updated game until last night, but I've got to say, well done Crash.There's a hell of a lot going on, and a great attention to detail, it really does extend the Star Fleet universe with all the new craft and weapons available.One thing I will say though is, wow! that's a lot of sprites on screen at one time, it makes for some wild and intense game-play, but is still causing a great deal of slow-down on my dual-core 1.46 GHz laptop. Not the most powerful computer in the world, but I'm sure there are people out there with less powerful machines. Just wanted to point that out as A) There's a potentially wonderful little game here and B) It might be just my computer that has the issue and maybe I need to do something.The game does seem geared for slightly more strategic play than most arcade shooters of yesteryear, as you can't help but be hit by a lot of the 'bullets' (Which is spot on with the series when you realise how much flak the X Bomber had to endure) while trying to collect the energy restoring power-ups.Anyway, fantastic work Crash! Respect for all the hard work you've put into it.

[Crash]

Yep, Clickteam's HWA really is earning its keep with X-Bomber.Basically now that I've got that, I'm just seeing how far I can push the envelope.I've found that the game runs fine on my old desktop which is a single Athlon_64@2.0GHz and it has a 9800XT GPU, which is antiquated. My 2 year old notebook's GPU was old when that notebook was released and it has about 5x as much speed.The only exception is Level 10, at the end. The Boss generates a huge number of objects and I've scaled that back so that it works OK.Basically to run it on a notebook, it needs a relatively modern separate GPU (Nvidia 7600 and above will be ample) and it needs to be plugged in. A laptop's gaming speed basically halves on battery.So the game does run - it just needs a substantial amount of power to run. You also need to ensure that you have DirectX9 otherwise the game will just run in the CPU without telling you and on just my Core2Duo it didn't run the earlier levels at all badly so that might be it. I'm just sorry I haven't been able to get the briefings and narrative finished better. I had some cutscenes but MMF2 seems to have corrupted most of them so it's back to the drawing board with those. Basically my Uni Course comes to an end this year and I really couldn't care less about it. But after that I may have to nearly stop working on the game. So I'm really giving it some at the moment. I'm at the stage of making nearly 1 Mission per month. There are 5-and-a-bit left to do so...I'm just really grateful people have downloaded it and had a go at it. I hope people think it's vaguely in-keeping with the series. After all - what was seen on-screen of the Alliance was defeated so it stands to reason that if they ever returned it would be a different strand of Alliance - like the Drakh-Shadows relationship from Babylon-5. That's why I've let certain things pass like the fact that the Alliance fighters are sprited more streamlined in the game. The X-Bomber is supposed to be a bit improved too. You could have had more weapons from the show but I put them in originally and they served no purpose but to confuse players.And a lot of people who write shooters think it kills gameplay but I felt it was ridiculous to have the huge robot that was totally indestructible in the show take one hit and die in the game. That's what powerups are for - to turn an interactive movie into a game with an objective.I think the gameplay's pretty good as it is. It could take some tweaking once the game's done but I'm always ontop of the gameplay until I feel I've got it right.At least I'm not like Gerry Anderson, where apparently all he sees is strings when he watches his shows. I can really get into the feel of the game and get caught up like it was a sequel to the show.

[Shane]

Yes, after testing the game again I think it's definitely down to the limitation of my laptop rather than the game itself. The first couple of levels run smoothly then slow-down city.I think the new Alliance ships are great, when I was tinkering about with The Revenge of Makara storyline I always envisaged there would still be many different alliance cruisers scattered around the galaxy after the Imperial Master was destroyed. It's a bit like the end of Return of the Jedi. OK, so you've killed the main bad guy, his base and a fair few star destroyers but what about the thousands of Imperial ships that are still left out there? Hardly a conclusive victory.

[Crash]

Well, I rather went off in my head and envisioned that since it stated in the series that the Imperial Alliance 'dominated 90% of the galaxy' or something along those lines... that it was reasonable to assume that 'the imperial master' was simply an imperial master and that all that'd been defeated was a division or a principality within this greater organisation.I mean think about it... how likely is it that you'd rule the galaxy with one battlecruiser and one space fortress. In Gundam the Principality of Zeon couldn't take over my house with just that.Old Go Nagai and even that Elman guy had plans for a second series before all the props got toasted. It said in the DVDs that Nagai had wanted the Alliance to have a robot as well to fight Dai-X. Because the game's not a beat-em-up there's a limit to what I can do with that. It would be nice to have a Matrix-Revolutions aerial fist-fight with another robot but... I'm not sure how anyone would go about that in a shooter. Even in Gundam they tend not to go hand to hand very often.I did see an interesting shooter recently where one of the robots you flew had a melee attack and I think I could do something similar for Dai-X. Another thing I want to add is a special weapon for Dai-X consisting of a red/white metal shield and a hand-held rifle. That might seem like a travesty to some but it seems like a fun idea. Having said that no-one complained too much about the 4th Dai-X fighter that comes in and docks with Dai-X. I think partly because it happened to work so well that no-one could object.One particularly attractive image I imagined was a dark planet with thousands of fortresses orbiting it, ready to go with more being built. So there'll be flying around inside one of those at the end of the game. I was never too fond of Lamia. I prefer it when machinery does the talking rather than special powers (that's why I hate marvel comics) and besides you can hardly reach the end of the game and have someone else kill the main bad guy. That would be a terrible ending to a game in my view. I mean it would be the only way they coulda made Doom3 any worse if they'd just done that. You might as well have a crack at installing this - it might free up the game if it's not using the GPU already.http://www.microsoft.com/downloa....lang=en