XPilot
XPilot is a multi-player tactical manouvring game for X and Unix workstations.
- Contributed by
- Ron Record (rr@sco.com)
- Obtained via
- Anonymous ftp to ftp.cs.uit.no (129.242.16.93) :
/pub/games/xpilot/xpilot-3.3.0.tar.gz.
- Author(s)
- XPilot is written by Bjoern Stabell, Ken Ronny Schouten and Bert Gijsbers.
Many people around the world have contributed ideas and code or helped in
other ways to have XPilot run on a diverse set of Unix computers and VMS.
- Restrictions
- Gnu General Public License
Description
Players have a fighter which they move along in an artificial world
and shoot each other using various kinds of weapons like bullets, mines,
smart missiles, heat seekers and so on. It is a fast paced game with
a lot of tactics. There are also robots flying around shooting players
and other robots. Players can pickup special bonuses to improve the
possibilities of their ship like more engine power or special weapons.
The aim of the game is to score points and to have a lot of fun.
People can create their own maps using either a standard text editor or
a nifty map editor with easy-to-use graphical user interface.
Nice maps are a popular item to share with others.
The game is very configurable in that you can specify many parameters
in a defaults file, in the map file or on the command line. Configurable
options include the speed of shots, the lifetime of shots, the force and
direction of the gravity, whether players can use shields or not, the chance
that some kind of special bonus appears in the world, the number of screen
updates per second and so on.
Since release 3.0 it is possible to play games across the Internet if
the roundtrip times are below 150 milliseconds or so, depending on the
frame rate of the XPilot server.
Starting XPilot
When you have managed to compile XPilot successfully you will have
two new executables. One program is named 'xpilots', which is the
server program. If you do: `xpilots -help' then you will see some
configuration options with explanations. Start this program in one window
simply by typing: xpilots or ./xpilots. Nothing much will happen yet.
The other program is named 'xpilot', which is the client program.
Startup this program in a second window. If you start this program
without arguments it tries to find an XPilot server on your local network.
Otherwise give it the name of the host where the XPilot server is
running as its last command line argument.
The xpilot client program should now print a message like:
*** Server on darkstar.frop.org. Enter command>
Now type a question mark '?' to see some possible options.
Or simply type a return to enter the game.
Newbies should note that in order to fire one has to put down
the shield first. This is done by pressing and releasing the
spacebar once.
- Productivity
- Dependant on your appreciation of the relationship between recreation
and productivity...
- Safety
- Examined code and run it occasionally
- Work Planned
- None
- Documentation
- The README, FAQ and Man Pages in the source directory
(/usr/skunk/src/Games/xpilot-3.3.1). In particular, the
man pages xp-replay,
xpilot and
man pages xpilots, provide
valuable documentation.
Build Notes
This source is configured to be installed under
/usr/skunk.
The datafiles are installed under /usr/skunk/gameslib/xpilot
To change the default lib modify the src/config.h header file
and src/Imakefile in the src tree.
SkunkWare 5.0 1995
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