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.
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. Various interfaces to the XPilot metaserver. XPilot servers running , a WWW-interface to the metaserver by Johan Danielsson.