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INTRODUCTION TO XPILOT
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XPilot is my favourite computer game. Yep, even though it is freeware I rank it
over most of the commercial games available today! Why? Because it is a very nice
combination of realtime action and strategy (in an
"Asteroids"-like environment).
And because it is a great multi-player game.
It is fast and have a realistic physics model.
It is very configurable. You can make your own maps, draw your
own ships and almost every parameter in the game can be modified.
A lot of servers is running different kinds of maps all over the world.
Simple but fun, you-are-on-your-own, maps for fast, uncomplicated action and other
more sophisticated maps allowing team play and strategic thinking.
The only thing that could be a little better is the graphics, although it doesn't
matter to me - the gameplay is great - and that's what I care about.
Try it, but be warned: Once you learn how to play it is hard to stop (I have
played for 4 years now...with some breaks of course :-)
Unfortunately XPilot has only been available to the Unix world. But a Windows
version is under development. To get a more detailed description of XPilot,
learn how to play and get some tips, please visit the Xpilot
Newbie Manual.
The XPilot Page is also
a good starting point, and so is
The XPilot First Aid Page.
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ME AND XPILOT
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The first time I tried XPilot was in '93 when going through some of the
X-Windows games installed at school. The workstations we had at that
time were too slow so the game was hardly playable. So I didn't play
any more for about half a year or so. But in '94, when I got access
to faster workstations I started playing for real and have played
since then.
I prefer team maps - like Blood's Music. I don't like maps with too much
garbage (items) floating around - these games often turns out to be a
"the-guy-with-most-items-wins" games. Well, sometimes they can be fun,
but I think team maps offer more interesting games and variation in
the long run.
I've drawn several ships but mostly I use only one of them, the skull,
which you can see to the left. My two most frequently used nicknames
are HeadAce and Gnilrävs.
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HeadAce
Once upon the time when I had drawn the skull ship I had to find
a name for it. I though about using Skull but it sounded too
common. But since it is a head I decided to use the name the
name Headache (well, the skull doesn't look happy anyway).
But I wasn't sure how to spell it so I switched to HeadAce
(and didn't bother to change back after finding out the correct
spelling - HeadAce sounds ugly anyway...)
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Gnilrävs
After a (long) time I got tired of HeadAce. I though it
would be nice to use another nick for once. Besides, 'HeadAce' sounds
a bit...I don't know...So I come up with the name Gnilrävs.
Hehe...really ugly! But what the hell does that mean?
Well, I won't tell you directly - but
I can give you a little hint: What's my surname? :-)
Mousehead
Recently I've started to play using the mouse instead of the
keyboard. Since I don't play very often in these days it will take
some time before I'm totally comfortable with the mouse.
I still lack some control and I'm not as good as when playing
using the keyboard, but hey - just give me some time.
Dodging bullets is a lot easier now and the 180 degree
turns are just wonderful... :-)
Other identities
Sometimes I play using other identities (but not very often).
I will not reveal these secret identities of course (hehe :-))
Other stuff
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SOME OF MY MAPS
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I have made some maps which are available for download.
Most of the maps are quite old but if you don't care about that
you're free to download them (by clicking on the map) and
run them on your own server.
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Team Terror
This is my very first map (made in 1993). A team map, nothing special.
I didn't know about all the parameters at that time so
there may be some "bugs". I was inspired by the famous Blood's Music
map when making this one. It has 4 teams with 5 players in each team.
A lot of the items are available.
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Just (s)kill
A dogfight map with 20 homebases or something like that. A lot of places
where you can hide, escape, ambush or whatever. Can be quite fun with
a lot of players. I remember playing king-of-the-hill style games
on this map (i.e. capture and hold a certain homebase). Some items,
but not many.
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Race In Space
I don't remember why I wanted to make a race map since the current
implementation of the 'race mode' isn't very good in my opinion.
But if you want to show how good you are at navigating through
cyberspace this is the map for you...
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Ball Bana
A very small team map with two teams. The key to victory is the
ball (treasure). The map is symetric and the two treasures lie very
close to each other - but with a wall separating them. In other words,
you can see when the opponent tries to put your treasure in the
treasure box and try to disturb him (for example with tractor beams).
Note: The name means 'Cool Map' (roughly) if you read it in swedish...:-)
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Close Combat
A very small dogfight map (no items) for 16 players. No items are
allowed which opens up for some real dogfighting. The map is divided
into four 'caves' with four bases in each cave. Perhaps I could make
a team version too? Each cave has a two islands where you can take
cover from incoming bullets. Each player has unlimited lives. This means
that you don't have to wait for everybody to die. This, and the small,
map size, should open up for some fast paced action!
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MY CONTRIBUTIONS TO XPILOT
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None of the patches are official so you should of course contact me if
you have any comments or problems - not the XPilot authors.
Also, please read my disclaimer (yeah, right :-)
before trying any of this stuff.
Talk Patch
This patch makes it possible to store predefined messages
which can be sent by a single keypress. The messages is written
in a simple macro-language allowing randomness, insertion of
team numbers and more. See the documentation
for more info.
H.E.R.O. (Adam Lorentzon) and I originally made this patch a few years ago
but it should work on new versions too!
Click here to download. I know
it is better to use patch files but...
Update: Holger von Rhein (hrhein@mathematik.tu-darmstadt.de)
has made some diffs that works with xpilot 4.1.0 (and probably newer versions too).
Click here to download the diffs.
Zwrite Patch
If you are using Zephyr and the zwrite command at your
place this patch can be useful (not really). It allows you
to send zwrite's directly from XPilot using the normal
talk window. Instead of typing "[name]: [message]" to send
a message to the player "name" you write "@[user]: [message]"
to write a message to a local "user".
Currently not available for download...who want's it anyway?
XPMon
This is a simple Perl program which makes it easy to monitor
and join active XPilot servers around the world. I know there
exists fancier interfaces for doing this (and I have used
one of these my self previously but it was too slow and a little
buggy). I am not sure my program is much better but its power
is the simplicity. That is, no fancy graphics, it runs in a
terminal window, and can be executed on all systems
that have Perl installed.
It also does some pattern matching which
makes it easy to find servers and pilots. You can download
the Perl file by clicking here. I'm not a Perl
expert so the code is a bit ugly - fortunately you don't have to look
at it if you don't want to :-). But you might need to change
the path to Perl on the first line in the file. And the default
settings in the top of the file (for example the xpilot command to
be executed). I also planned to make it possible to load the settings
from a resource file but haven't implemented it yet (and never will?)
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ShipShaper is my freeware shipshape editor for XPilot.
Click on the logo to get to the ShipShaper homepage.
Features:
- Written in Java. This means it should run on all platforms
with a Java virtual machine (but this is not always true,
see below).
- Nice, easy to use graphical interface (I hope).
- You can draw ship edges one by one. When saving a ship
the program calculated the minimum number of "real" edges
needed to create a ship made up of a single polyline.
- Cut, copy, and paste.
- Operations like moving, splitting, and joining on vertices
(ship nodes) and ship edges.
- Operations like scrolling, rotating and flipping on ships.
- Possible to edit ships in two directions. With the nose
facing up, and with the nose facing right.
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LINKS TO THE XPILOT WORLD
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Getting more information
Here are some of the best places where you can get up to date
information related to xpilot.
Download
Here are some links to places where you can download the latest
versions of XPilot (also look at the The Xpilot Page):
Events
Some links to tournaments and other events.
Ranking lists
Some servers rank players after their performance at that particular server.
This ranking should not be taken so seriously since it doesn't consider
all aspects of the game. But a player ranked as number one is certainly not a
poor player...
Active servers
To find out which servers are running out there in XPilot space
click on one of the following links.
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