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 decided to expand the use of the site's new method of thumbnailing gallery pages to cover GIF images.
After that, I tested it on PNGs and found that even before the thumbnails had been generated and cached, it was creating them and loading the page faster than with SLIR.
JPEG images are also being done via the new method and, with that, all gallery page thumbnails are being handled by the site itself.
The image loading speeds are much improved. If I'd known how fast it was by comparison, I would have pressed on with it before now.
Because this method creates a pool of thumbnails for each folder, for practically all image types (JPEG, PNG, GIF, WEBP and AVIF), folder preview now works, even when there are only non-JPEG/PNG/GIF images in the folder, which was a limitation before.
Because the site generates the thumbnails at 418 pixels wide and shrinks them down to 209px width, the thumbnails are nice and sharp on displays with >100% display scaling.
I found a bug with the folder preview, where, if the file name included a single quote in the filename, it would break the style element in the HTML that makes it display.
That's now fixed.
One nice thing about the Sphider search feature on the site, as it relates to this, is that it meanders through the site every hour and, if the thumbnails need to be regenerated for whatever reason, it means that the search process will trigger thumbnail regeneration across the site without anyone having to go and visit those pages beforehand.
Now that SLIR is being used much less, I might be able to reclaim some space by clearing out its cache.  This is an interesting Star Fleet fan illustration by Ricardo Andrade.
I don't think I've ever seen a Star Fleet fan artwork done in this style before.
I would be interested to know how it was done. It looks to be a traditional painting.
It's interesting how some fan artworks focus on the machines and action from the show and some focus on the human character aspect like this one.  I found this illustration of Dai-X by Jerry Bennett, who did this for a friend of his.
Very nice style, would be good to see some more of this - maybe even a colour version.  I found this article from Anime Network UK over Nitter which talks about Miniarts' X-Bomber model, which looks really nice.
They now do it in the beige/brown colours that the studio model was actually painted in, or in the white and grey, as it appeared under the show's blue lighting (and how it was presented at the 2022 Expo in Tokyo).
Miniart's eBay listings also show that it's available in two scales.  This illustration of Commander Makara is by Go Nagai and features in the Go Nagai Fan Club Associate Magazine "Makai Tsuushin" (Demon Realm Communications).
The fan club was formed in 1970 and issued a number of publications alongside Makai Tsuushin.
The Makara illustration features in the December 31, 1979 instalment (S54).
You can find a lot more information as well as lots of nice images on this page of the Go Nagai and the World of BBR site (mazingerz.com).
There is something slightly screwy about the JPG image of Makara from the above website.
PHP won't resize it and Photoshop won't open it either, so I copied and re-saved it as PNG.  Thanks to Keith Martin for sending me some nice shots of the production images from the X-Bomber Exhibition 2022 Pictorial Record,
I see that this book that was made as a companion to the 2022 Exhibition in Tokyo is still available for sale.
One day, I might do some scans from the book to expand the site's behind-the-scenes images.
With the book still being available from GoodSmile, I'm not in a hurry to scan anything from this book at the moment. I checked on the site last night and lo-and-behold, the entire site was down due to a new type of DDoS attack against the forum.
This time, the requests have been coming from all-over such as the United States, Mexico and Saudia Arabia.
There didn't seem to be as many individual user agents, so they managed to get under the 500-user ceiling that's set on phpBB, but those fewer endpoints seemed to be creating more requests with more demanding queries.
According to phpBB's own forum, we aren't the only people to be honoured with this special treatment.
The thing that seems to solve the problem best is just to play cat and mouse and move the URL path of the forum around so that the bots just receive a 404 error.
I have written my own little 'viewtopic.php' script in the original location so that real users can be forwarded from static links on gallery/media pages to topics on the forum in their new location.
In Other News
The news system icons have been adjusted to match the colours of the site.  I came across this interesting article on Sixties City, which is a fascinating site: a real labour of love by its creator.
This article lists the later Gerry Anderson productions - some of which made it all the way to fruition, while some didn't.
What I found very interesting was the 1984 T-Force attempt to reboot Thunderbirds.
In particular, the base was a huge carrier sub.
While we never got to see this in connection with anything to do with Thunderbirds, I like how the idea was held onto and used later on in Firestorm with the Ocean Storm, which is a similar, huge carrier sub, but which is also a bit tidier, more streamlined and less sprawling than the concept shown on this page.
I tried loading the forum earlier today and the built-in session throttle stopped it from loading.
Once I increased the limit a bit, it loaded and we had 500 simultaneous 'guest users' on the forum, which wasn't putting a very big demand on the server.
The vast majority of these bot users have always originated from Singapore.
I traced a number of these IPs back to a network provider: ByteDance, that is actually Chinese-owned.
One thing you notice about their website is that it has no means of reporting any abuse of their network (assuming that the bot traffic actually is an unauthorised use of their network).
You can find all sorts of other interesting things about the company, here.
The second thing I notice from their website is how non-Chinese the company's board of directors is.
In any case, I blocked all IP ranges for this provider, along with the long-standing block for Alibaba Cloud.
That brought the number of sessions down to about 200.
My problem with excluding all IP ranges for specific providers is that, for every request, the server has to evaluate a huge number of lines in the htaccess file.
I decided to block all requests from Singapore to the forum, which, to me, is the least-bad of a bad range of options.
There is an extension for phpBB that handles this kind of geo-blocking.
However, I was sad to see that the creator of that extension: Mark D. Hamill had died last year.
Mark seems to have contributed hugely to phpBB and its users.
Rather than relying on an extension that probably can't ever receive any updates, I looked into doing it at the server level.
Lightspeed and Apache have the same mechanism as the phpBB plugin where they can use the GeoIP plugin or MaxMind database to evaluate where the agent's IP provider is located.
Anyway, after enabling this, the number of guest users on the forum is down to low double figures, which we'll run with for the time being.  Dear Star Fleeters,
I set the upcoming Star Fleet Teams for Tuesday 28th April at 8PM (UK).
Please check out the Star Fleet Teams page for the meeting link.
Anyone who wishes to join is welcome to join.
We will probably be chatting about ... Star Fleet and other things.
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Late to the Moderoid / Good Smile Dai-X, and then the Imperial Master stopped by - it's been a surreal day!
Late to the Moderoid / Good Smile Dai-X, and then the Imperial Master stopped by - it's been a surreal day!
Late to the Moderoid / Good Smile Dai-X, and then the Imperial Master stopped by - it's been a surreal day!
Late to the Moderoid / Good Smile Dai-X, and then the Imperial Master stopped by - it's been a surreal day!
Late to the Moderoid / Good Smile Dai-X, and then the Imperial Master stopped by - it's been a surreal day!
Merry Festivities and Fixes!
Merry Festivities and Fixes!
An actual Star Fleet video from me, it's been a minute!
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