There are an awful lot of XPilot maps out there, but this page covers some of the more popular ones. The images of the maps were made with the free utility xp2gif for Linux. The XPilot-NG map images were captured from Baron's XPilot-NG Map Editor. Colors: Bases, Cannons, Decoration, Friction, Fuel, Gravity, Walls, and Wormholes. All maps are shown to soale, unless otherwise specified.
Circle Cannon Dodgers Dungeons of Fear! Fishfight The Globe New Dark Hell Planet X
Robot Extermination (robot abuse!) tzx-rambunctious Xpilot-Tournament Map (Blood's Music)
This is a remake of another map called Dodgers, where the goal is to avoid robots' bullets and stay alive as long as possible. CCD has cannons instead of robots, and no player shots allowed. It's a good map for developing superb dodging skills, but can be rather frustrating, since you have to move around constantly to stay clear of the bullets. This map ran on piper.gotdns.com for a while; my best time was around 25 seconds. (Of course, I'm local.)
This map and Vincent's Robot Extermination were my original inspirations for the Plasma Blast maps. I run it on our server occasionally.
A rather interesting map included with the XPilot5 package. You can fire only 3 shots at a time on this map, which makes it much more challenging than maps like NDH and TZX. Dick Balaska ("Bucko"/"Dick") had a ranking Fishfight server set up a while back, but the ranking function stopped working properly and he shut it down. However, I started a server of my own very soon after, and Fishfight eventually evolved into my Fishtank maps. Download!
Also known as The Newbie Globe. It was the first map I ever played, being the default map for the XPilot server. It was also likely the inspiration for my first map, The Electric Fence.
NDH is a very popular newbie map, but many experienced players like it too. The first well-known NDH server that I'm aware of was stinkymonkey.cc.columbia.edu, or just Stinkymonkey. That server was very popular because it had a ranking function. (I don't remember if any of the four of us made it into the top 100; however, I do remember that Arachnoid was the king of robot kills and suicides!) However, Stinkymonkey disappeared, and there hasn't been a ranking NDH server since. (Actually that's not true; Dick has lately been running a ranking NDH server on shirley.buckosoft.com emphasizing lasers and torpedoes, along with modified robot code.) A variation on the map, Nuke Dark Hell by Abyss, added item concentrators and enabled nuclear weapons. That server, deepcore.uoregon.edu (or just Deepcore), was popular for a while, until it too disappeared. And, of course, NDH was undoubtedly the inspiration for tzx-rambunctious. NDH is included with newer versions of XPilot, and a polygon version (New Dark Hell-Next Generation) is included with XPilot-NG. There is an NDH server running on piper.gotdns.com port 15348.
Similar to Bjørn's Globe, this map was another of the ones I ran frequently many years ago. Included with XPilot.
I felt I needed to include this gem of Vincent's here, since I have it running on piper.gotdns.com port 15346, and have had a lot of fun with it. After all, some of the ideas in the Plasma Blast maps came from this map—most notably the "gravity well." In a way, it's a lot like New Dark Hell with shields—a player can get on, gobble up items, and fly around terrorizing the populace. The map itself can be downloaded from Vincent's site.
I'm not exactly sure when this map popped up, but it was sometime after the disappearance of Stinkymonkey. It became quite popular, and even more so when Clef modified it, adding complex tunnels to the larger structures. These tunnels have a ton of cannons in them, and they all use items, so I refer to them as the "cannon mines." The latest version of TZX Rambunctious Modified has cannon mines in nearly every structure, and bases in the middle of some of them. (IMO, the first TZX Mod was better.) TZX Mod hasn't been running for a while, but the original map is currently running on piper.gotdns.com port 15347. Download!
Arguably the most popular XPilot map of all, Blood's is a team map, where the object is to steal the opposing team's treasure (a.k.a. ball) and cash it into your team's treasure box. It has undergone many changes since the beginning, mostly in the area of gameplay performance and physics. The polygon version for XPilot-NG was the de facto standard for Bloods until BloodsPilot was developed; the latter version is now the most widely used. One version or another of the map is included in every version of XPilot, and the polygon version, of course, comes with NG, but may not be the latest version; for the latest one (v10 8T2, I think), visit the Sourceforge CVS archive. The aforementioned BloodsPilot was created for the sole purpose of running Bloods-like maps. Many Bloods servers have ranking, some based on ballrun time (the time between taking the ball and cashing it), or on other ballrun statistics. I ran a BloodsPilot server on piper.gotdns.com for a while, but it didn't get much attention.
This page was last updated on 01 October 2009.
Page design is ©2009 Thomas Keith / Insectoid.