XPilot 4.5.4

XPilot project is a multi-player 2D client/server space game.
XPilot is a multi-player 2D space game. Some features are borrowed from classics like the Atari coin-ups Asteroids and Gravitar, and the home-computer games Thrust (Commodore 64) and Gravity Force (Commodore Amiga), but XPilot has many new aspects too.
Main features:
- True client/server based game; optimal speed for every player.
- Meta server with up to date information about servers hosting games around the world.
- A web of world-wide rating servers; compare your skills with pilots from all around the world, and climb the ladder of the world-wide rating list.
- Real physics; particles of explosions and sparks from your engines all affect you if youre hit by them. This makes it possible to kill someone by blowing them into a wall with engine thrust or shock waves from explosions.
- Specialized editors for editing ship-shapes and maps.
- Game objective and gameplay adjustable through a number of options, specified on the commandline, in special option files, or in the map files. Examples of modes of the game:
- classical dogfight; equipped with only your gun, you have to rely on your maneuvering and tactical skills
- team; fight together, steal other teamss treasures (involves flying around with a ball in a string, much like in Thrust) and blow up their targets (which are, no doubt, heavily guarded)
- all out nuclear war; chose carefully between more than twenty weapon and defense systems to stay alive and annihilate your enemies
- race; make it through the deadly course before your opponents
- Adjustable gravity; adjustable by putting special attractors or deflectors in the world, or by adjusting the global gravity in various ways.
- Cannons and personalized and vengeful robot fighters give you a hard time.
- Watch your energy, and remember to dock with a fuel station to refuel before its too late.
- Defend your home base, or terrorize and steal someone elses.
- Equip your ship with the 15+ defense and weapon systems: afterburners, cloaking devices, sensors, transporters, extra cannons, mines and bombs, rockets (smarts, torpedos and nuclear), ECM, laser, extra tanks, autopilot etc.
To start playing, you need to connect to a server by using a client program called xpilot. There are always servers running if you check with the meta server, but if you for some reason do not want to join them, youll have to start a server of your own (see man-page xpilots(6)).
Enhancements:
- Team cannons could kill teammates with laser pulses. Fixed.
- On the map Death Star one can destroy a large number of targets with one FNC. This results in packet buffer overflows and slow updates. To overcome this a smarter map update algorithm is implemented in the server and also map updates are now limited to max 2 KB per network packet.
- The default score font was reduced from 15 to 13.
- When the server sends map updates to the client these are now always acknowledged immediately by the client. This should help prevent stalls or lock-ups on maps where are a large number of targets or cannons can be destroyed. It should also reduce the number of very big server frame update packets.
- Robots no longer try to go after players who arent in playing mode.