X-Bomber the GameIntroduction »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 » 
I'm given to understand that Dan's SFFB has reached 1,250 users, which is an excellent achievement.
It's remarkable to keep growing a group about a TV show that's well-over 40 years old, and hasn't been aired in almost as long. 
with having been travelling around for the last 2 weeks, there's been no X-Bomber or Star Fleet news.
Many thanks to Dan Hitchin, for letting me have a series of updates from Gary Cass, who has started work on The Skull.
I think I won a bet with someone, because I predicted that this would be his next Star Fleet project.
This model is looking even better than I expected. 
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. I've started work on v0.84k:
- Main menu colour change option - (WIP)
- X-Bomber Prototype turrets fire yellow tracers, rather than blue.
- Improvements to Dai-X junction and control mapping systems
- Improvements to shield and damage indication systems
- Hit boxes reshaped on Dai-X fighters
- Dai-X pulse gun shots travel faster.
- X-Bomber neck lasers improved
- Flashing cursor added to high score menu, to make the name input field more apparent.
To-do
- Finish work on power-up sprites
- Add mini pulse gun to Legtrax to compensate for hitbox size increase.
- Continue work on L16 reactor.
- Dai-X quantum blaster - unselected beam mode 
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.
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