XPilot


This is "The Globe" by Bjørn Stabell (XPilot co-author), and is the default map in the game.

XPilot is a gravity-based multiplayer network war game, a space shooter with aspects derived from Atari's Asteroids and Gravitar arcade coin-ops, and from the Commodore 64 game Thrust.  XPilot was originally created for UNIX in 1991-2, but has since been ported to just about every UNIX- or Linux-based PC (when I say 'Unix', this is generally what I mean).  It also has ports to Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows (95 and up), and even for the Apple iPhone and iPad.  The official story of how XPilot began is here.


About Insectoid's XPiloting family    Servers of Old    Today, Piper, and the Future

Summary of XPilot Versions    External Links    Insectoid's XPilot Pages


Notice to Readers:

I moved several sections of this page into the new Insectoid's Newbie Guide, so I apologize for any confusion caused by the re-shuffle.

Any questions or comments you might have about the pages, the Newbie Guide, maps, ships, or XPilot in general may be directed to insectoid (at) budwin (dot) net; please put IWP: XPilot: in the subject line.  Source-code and feature-related queries should be sent to the developers; see xpilot.org.  Any spam mail will be subject to immediate de-resolution!

About the ship images on this page:

All of the color images below are not what ships really look like in XPilot; they are merely an artistic rendering of those ships.  (The artist, of course, is me.)  They were generated in several steps from the original shipshape file, which was converted to PostScript using the ship2ps program, then to PDF using GhostScript ps2pdf.  This was then imported into Inkscape (an open-source vector graphics editor), where each individual ship was resized to its proper dimensions, inverted (for display on a dark background) and saved as individual SVG files.  (Which are 31x31 px; but for the Ships by Insectoid pages, I scaled them to 53x53 px.) For the six ships displayed here, I enlarged them to a moderate size (around 80x80 px), and added the fiery exhaust and bright blue shield to bring the image size to 96x96 px.  Custom gradients were applied, and so were other objects (like the backgrounds, bullets, etc.), followed by several of Inkscape's special graphics filters.  Finally, they were exported to PNG images in several sizes.  (I would have put the SVGs themselves on this page, but with all the gradients and filters, there's no guarantee they'd display correctly in all browsers—especially Internet Explorer, which does not support filters at all.)


About Insectoid's XPiloting family.

(Click on a color ship image for 320x320 px enlarged image)

Insectoid

Insectoid

My nickname has sort of a silly origin; I named it for the line of LEGO building sets from the late 1990's.  I started playing in 2000 shortly after my dad discovered this wonderful little game.  I initially played with the keyboard only, but later started using both the mouse and keyboard.  (I occasionally go back to playing with only the keyboard for maps like NDH, to give my brother and uncle a fairer game.)  I'm willing to play just about every dogfighting map; I tend to shy away from Blood's Music (I'm not very good at it).  Insectoid has evolved through 12 ship variations, one of which (Insectoid IV) was seldom used, and one of which (Insectoid I) no longer exists.  In addition to those, I have made over 300 shipshapes, from arcade-like (Centipede, for example) to Star Trek and Star Wars.  The nicks that I've used most often aside from Insectoid are Dragon Reborn (right), a tribute to the late Robert Jordan and his epic fantasy book series The Wheel of Time, and Drizzt, from R. A. Salvatore's Forgotten Realms Legend of Drizzt novels.

Dragon Reborn

 

Arachnoid

Arachnoid

I created a similar nickname for my older brother; we're collectively known as the "bugs" or "'oids" by many players.  Like me, he started with keyboard, and eventually started using the mouse.  He plays just about every map, whether he's good at it or not. And yes, I make all of his shipshapes; he's had 5 associated with Arachnoid, the first two of which looked similar to mine, and the other three look like the one to the left.

 

Mrnexrad

Mrnexrad

Once Spider and I started playing online, we got our uncle acquainted with the game, and he began playing that same year.  The name is a shortened form of "Mr. NEXRAD" (NEXRAD is a radar system used by the NOAA National Weather Service; he's sort of a weather guru).  Anyway, he used that name for a long time, and then started using some different names, beginning with Milkwuss.  Since he's not all that good at drawing ships (and, as far as I know, doesn't know how), I make them; a large portion of my 250+ ships have been made for him, including a series of "Bone" ships.  Some of his favorite personas are Diet Coke and ShitFork (aka Hell Yes!, right).

Hell Yes!

 

GumbaWarrior

GumbaWarrior

My dad found and introduced this game to us in late 1999; I'm really not quite sure how he came up with that name.  (Possibly a corruption of 'Gungan warrior'; Star Wars: Episode I came out that year.)  Like Mrnexrad, he has always used the keyboard.  He still plays as Gumba occasionally, but more often he uses a script to play with a random persona each time; some players refer to him as "Mr. Random".  His only other consistent persona, Shopping Days, only appears during the holiday season.  Occasionally, he uses some of my Star Trek ships, but he has also made several hundred or so of his own.


Servers of Old.

(Old is a relative term; since we started playing XPilot 6 years or so after it began, this only covers the servers from about 2000-2008.)

One of the very first servers we played on was called "hanging-gardens-of-babylon"; I don't recall the exact name, what map it hosted, or when it disappeared, but I think it was a European server.

Stinkymonkey.cc.columbia.edu:  The four of us were regular players on this infamous New Dark Hell server in the early '00s.  One of its attractions for many players was the player ranking system, although it was sometimes abused (::coughcoughWHATISTHIS?????cough::).  (I don't recall whether any of us made it into the top 100.)  The server vanished sometime around '01 or '02.  (Such is the fate of servers hosted while at university.)

Arrow.yak.net:  This was another NDH server from the early '00s.

Deepcore.uoregon.edu:  After Stinky disappeared, we mostly played on this server, which hosted "Nuke Dark Hell", a nuclear-weapons version of NDH, that among other things had item concentrators and shields.  The server vanished after a year or so.

Xpilot.toyzworkz.com:  This server hosted "tzx-rambunctious", a NDH-like map.  It was superseded in popularity by its modified version below.

Xpilot.terrabox.com: This was also TZX, I think, though I can't remember which one.  (Perhaps this was actually the original TZX server, and the author line (xpilot@toyzworkz.com) just confused me.  If anyone remembers, do correct me!)

Ip107.centonline.com:  Its "TZX Rambunctious Modified" server (a tunneled-out modification of TZX by Clef) became nearly as popular as Stinkymonkey before it.  Because the cannons on TZX used items, after a while the "cannon mines" become very difficult to navigate, but if you got out alive, you often would be able to terrorize the other players for quite a while.  The server vanished for a while, then returned (as ip207.centonline.com) with a newer, more dangerous version of the map (with some bases IN the "cannon mines"!), then vanished again, and hasn't been seen since.

*.Buckosoft.com:  Around the same time TZX-Mod was running, Bucko started this XPilot5 server, running a map called "Fishfight".  It featured cumulative ranking (it remembered our scores as well as rank).  Us 'oids were frequent players there until it vanished sometime in '06.  (For the record, I was rank 1 when it shut down; Bam Bam and Bmw were ranks 2 and 3.)

Crispexi.net:  This had a different name before he got his own; I don't recall what it was.  Crispexi (we being rather silly nicknamed him "Cereal", after Crispix) made a fun little map called "starship", which is a bit like TZX-Mod in its gameplay.  It was on-and-off for many years; the last time I remember it running was in March '08.  (Oh, and if you're reading this, Cereal... I'd really like a copy of the map to host!)

Xpilot-tag.venable.us:  I think that's what its name was.  This was a server run by V, with a map called "The Killing Fields". It was modified to be a "Tag" game; whoever was 'It' got more points for kills than other players, but lost over 100 points if they were killed (and that player would then become 'It').  One of the unique things about this server was that all of the robot names had something to do with Beatles songs (e.g., "Polythene Pan", "Mr. Mustard", "Eleanor Rigby", etc.).


Today, Piper, and the Future.

There are still servers running today, though the list is a pale shadow of what it used to be.  (I can recall, at one point in the mid-'00s, the list being as long as 90!)  There is still a fairly popular New Dark Hell server in Germany (xpilot.lkrauss.de), and an occasional server run by the authors of the XPilot App (xpilot*.7b5labs.com). As of this writing there are about 20 servers running, the majority of which are running on Rotunda's server in Poland, rotunda.wibro.agh.edu.pl (all team games), and on our own piper.dyndns-free.com.

Why "Piper", you wonder?  That name comes from the old Red Hat Linux distributions in the mid-'90s which, if you couldn't think of a name for your server or the workstations on your network, had a sample host file with hostnames named after aircraft.  (For example, my first computer, a little 386 box, was called "Fokker".)  So the name Piper stuck.

In the old days when we still had dialup, I ran my own servers on Piper occasionally, but because of the slow speed, it wasn't really worth it for most people.  When we went broadband, I started running one version or another of "Plasma Blast" (my little series of newbie maps); this wasn't really worth it either, as they are rather large and all.

However, when Bucko's Fishfight server vanished, I started up my own Fishfight server; this eventually led to my tinkering with it and, with its style of gameplay in mind, created the "Fishtank" series of maps, the latest of which is "Fishtank III", a map geared toward experienced players.  "Cells of Eclipse" and "{ Hextank }" also derive from the Fishfight concept.

Lately, the most popular of our servers is Cells of Eclipse, though NDH and Fishtank III occasionally draw a few players (especially if Spider and I are on).  Quite often, you can find Gumba playing on Cells of Eclipse under one of his many handles, cloaked and very dangerous.  (Hint: Use nuclear bombs and teach him a lesson!)

Though understandable, it is a little depressing that XPilot has lost a lot of interest in the past 5 years, and development is sporadic.  The only way I know to help is to host the most enjoyable maps I've made or know of, and hope that someday, someone or something will breathe some life back into this remarkable 20-year-old game.


Summary of XPilot Versions.

Version

Latest

Supports:

Stable

Devel

Item maps

Poly maps

XPilot

4.5.5

Unknown

Y

N

XPilot for Windows

4.5.4

4.5.5beta

Y

N

XPilot5 (Unix+Win)

5.0.0

5.0.1a3

Y

N

XPilot-NG

4.7.3

Unknown

Y

Y

BloodsPilot client

1.4.0

Unknown

Y

Y

BloodsPilot server

1.4.6fxi

Unknown

N

N

XPilot iPhone

1.2

Unknown

Y

Y


External Links.


Insectoid's XPilot Pages.


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