F.A.Q.

Q. Why does the spaceship appear as a white blank square?
A. This is because ship textures are precalculated which results in a too wide texture. You can try to set the option texturedShips off and restart the client. One way to do this is to make sure your configuration file $HOME/.xpilotrc or xpilotrc.txt (on Windows) contains the line

xpilot.texturedShips: no

Q. Why doesn't the shield go down automatically when I try to fire?
A. This can happen if some key is logically stuck. This bug is called "shield bug". The reason this happens is that you have pressed some key and then released it in such a way that the xpilot client haven't received the release event. You can test whether you have this bug in your client e.g. like this:

1. Change keyFireMissile to 'y', for example in xpilotrc or by issuing \set keyfiremissile y in a reasonably new NG client.

2. Having connected to a Blood's Music server, press the y key, keeping that pressed, then press m to open message window, then release y, then press Esc to close the message window. Now you have the shield bug.

3. Next time you die and appear on your base you will notice shooting won't any more drop your shields.

This bug has been fixed in XPilot NG cvs ; XPilot NG 4.7.0 will have a bugfixed client.

Q. I have X11 and have mouse steering. Why do I get delays when shooting and thrusting? Why does the thrust stop working suddenly?
A. The reason for this behaviour may be in the "Emulate 3 buttons" feature in X. Make sure you have the line

Option "Emulate3Buttons" "false"

in your X configuration file (e.g. /etc/X11/XF86Config-4).

NOTE: if you configure X with some configuration program and tell it to not enable Emulate3Buttons, the configuration program might not bother to specify Emulate3Buttons at all, in which case "soft" emulation is used, also causing the mentioned problems. If you have such a configuration program, you can tell it to enable the Emulate3Buttons and then after the configuration program has written the config file, you can change the value of "Emulate3Buttons" from "true" to "false".

Q. I have X11 and have mouse steering. The ship turns very fast and I am unable to steer properly, how can I improve this?
A. There may be several reasons for this. Try the following:

Try reducing the turnspeed, this can be done by pressing the minus (-) key of the keypad. You can also see the value by typing
\get turnspeed
in the message window and set it by typing
\set turnspeed 6
Try switching mouse accleration off. The client should do that automatically, but one can always try. Type
xset m 0 0
in a shell window, then go back to xpilot.
Look in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4. There were cases, where the same mouse was defined twice on two different devices (e.g. /dev/psaux and /dev/input/mice) once as "generic mouse", once as "configured mouse". This will effectively double all your mouse movements, but lead to some strange behavior of the mouse also. Remove one of the entries and restart the X server.

Q. The xpilot-client just hangs on connect to a server. My ISP enforces the use of a proxy for HTTP connections. What should I do?
A. The client is most likely trying to download map data (textures) from a webserver. The easiest way to see if this is the problem is to set the texturedWalls option to false in the configuration file (.xpilotrc) and then try to connect to the server.

Q. Are there any mapeditors to create maps for this splendid new version of xpilot?
A. Yes. There is for example this mapeditor written in Java.

Q. Are XPilotNG and XPilot 5 compatible?
A. Yes. Recent versions of XPilot 5 are compatible with XPilotNG. This means that the NG clients can be used to play on xp5 servers and that you can play on NG servers with a recent xp5 client.

Q. I have xpilot related problem FOOBAR, what should I do?
A. You can join the irc channel #xpilot on irc.freenode.net, the people there might be able to help.