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
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!
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
(Click on a color ship image for 320x320 px enlarged image)
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Insectoid |
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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. |
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Arachnoid |
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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. |
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Mrnexrad |
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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). |
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GumbaWarrior |
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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. |
(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.).
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.
Version |
Latest |
Supports: |
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Stable |
Devel |
Item maps |
Poly maps |
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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 |
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