XPilot

XPilot is a multiplayer Asteroids-like computer game. It is open source and runs on most platforms. Its graphics are 2-D, but it is an example of an early third-person shooter.

The graphics, although they have been improved over time, still resemble the style of Asteroids, but the gameplay includes Capture the Flag, base defense, racing and deathmatch.

XPilot-ng

In late 2000, a group of developers began a new branch of XPilot development, later labeled XPilot-ng (for next generation). The original branch continued to develop separately into what is now called XPilot5.

The last stable version of official XPilot is 4.5.4. The latest version of XPilot-ng is 4.7.2. The latest version of XPilot5 is 5.0.0a6. XPilot-ng and XPilot5 are compatible (clients and servers can communicate), but do not offer the same features.

XPilot-ng is programmed in C, and contains two clients, either X11 based or SDL and OpenGL based. XPilot-ng provides high frame rates, fully polygon maps (unlike the block based maps of the original XPilot) and better client support for windows based clients. A new Java based map editor provides better map editing facilities.

Groundbreaking aspects of XPilot

XPilot is an early example of a successful online multiplayer game. Its popularity can be attributed to the facts that it was open source and that its technical features included:

• metaservers to allow users to browse and then navigate to other running servers anywhere on the Internet
• initial implementation on X Window System, which was available on a wide variety of workstations.
• a well-defined client-server protocol that struck a balance between security and playability. In particular, security of the protocol was less than perfect in that the full game state was given to the client. While XPilot trusts a client that could easily be hacked, it also relieved the server of many tasks, allowing servers to scale up to potentially dozens of players.
• Conservative use of graphics to allow for smooth motion and realistic physics

In these ways, it paved the way for the Massively-Multiplayer games that followed.

XPilot Community

The development of XPilot's online multiplayer functionality spawned the formation of a tight-knit community via XPilot's innovative in-game chat function. Contact to other in-game players was solidified using newsgroups, alt.games.xpilot and later rec.games.computer.xpilot, which acted not only as a think-tank for the developers, but as a tool through which international competitions (Europa Cup), and media development could be organized. With the release of the first HTML code and the web browser, Mosaic, XPilot became the basis for the first ever large online manual (The XPilot Newbie Manual, 1994), taking advantage of the ability to produce images online within text for browsing, with 60 contributors and over 160 pages which were coded by hand.

External links

• Official homepage
• XPilot-ng homepage
• XPilot page at Sourceforge
• The Story of XPilot
• The XPilot Newbie Manual
• Artificial Intelligence Programming in Xpilot