#xpilot

The Name of the Bug.

I suppose I should begin at the beginning, and explain the origin of my screen name.  Now, I was a fairly avid Lego builder when I was young; it's lesser now, because of Real Life and Social Media Distractions, but a significant portion of my closet is filled with it. 😂  Anyway, about 20 years ago, Lego's newest building system was the Insectoids, which look like this:

[That's my own scan, BTW, of the #6907 instruction manual.  No point in hoarding Legos (and instruction manuals) if I don't show them off sometimes . . .]

Now kid-me, being an avid builder, and seeing that these sets were TOTALLY WICKED looking (and since I'd always liked the space sets in general), wanted every single set.  (We didn't accomplish that for many years, but some deals on eBay finished the collection eventually.)

Around the same time (late 1999 or 2000), my dad discovered a computer game for Linux that had been around for several years, called XPilot.  XPilot is a arcade shooter sort of game, largely influenced by Atari's Gravitar (which my dad also enjoyed), and a game inspired by it, Thrust.  As such, the game has fairly simple graphics, but has endless potential for customization, both in the server program (which runs the "map" or world you play in) and in the client program.  Most importantly, it is a multiplayer network game, gathering users from around the world, with a "meta server" that shows you what XPilot servers are running and who is playing, and allows you to join them.  (Despite the game's decline in popularity, by the way, the meta server is still running.)

Because it's open source, XPilot was soon ported to other OS's, including Windows.  My dad, brother, uncle, and I started playing around what I would guess was the peak of interest in the game; it wasn't too many years before human players started becoming scarce.  Here's an example of what XPilot looks like, captured from a game I played in 2016, using the teamplay-optimized fork of the original XPilot client:

[Full-res image is HERE.  That's my ship in the middle; the heads-up display shows who I'm targeting and what items I have, while the list at the left shows the players in the game, which on this map are mostly robots (R).]

Anyway, back to my story.  (If I carried on explaining the game, you might be stuck here reading all day.)  The short of it is: when we started playing XPilot, I needed a suitable nickname, and my latest Lego obsession fit the bill.  (As a side note, at the same time, I gave my brother a nick that complements this one: Arachnoid (or just Spider).  This earned us the collective nickname "oids" from a few players. 😂)

The Ship(s) of the Bug.

The spaceship that you fly around in XPilot, or "shipshape", can be whatever you choose or draw yourself, as long as it follows the predetermined rules.  Anything from a simple triangle—

[This is the default ship, if you have no other ship set.]

—up to a custom-drawn polygon of 24 vertices:

[Insectoid XII, 2012.]

The Insectoid ship here, "XII" or "Mk 12", is the twelfth iteration of its design going back to 2000:

[Twelve years of artistic tweaking.  Note that "I" is not here; it was lost long ago, but looked similar to "II".  "IV" and "VIIIB" were seldom-used prototypes.]

These are, of course, not the only ships I've designed.  Being artistically-inclined, I have, to this day, drawn 350 different ships.  (The bulk of these can be seen on my website.)  Now, because XPilot ships are simple polygons, it's fairly easy to make a graphic of one to use as an avatar online.  For a while, I did use a screenshot of my ship, hand edited in MS Paint and filtered in IrfanView to look more flashy:

[Insectoid VII, 2007, firing missiles.]

I used that method to make avatars until about 2011.  With Insectoid XI being more hexagonal in shape than its predecessors, I added an extra background feature to the drawing:

[Insectoid XI, 2011, with honeycomb background.]

In 2012, I discovered Inkscape, and eventually started using it to make vector graphics for my webpage.  The first thing I did, though, was convert my entire XPilot ship file at the time to a PDF, and thence to individual SVG images.  From there, I improved on my previous avatar-making process to present my newest ship, "XII", with the clean lines and filter effects only a vector graphics program like Inkscape could produce:

[Insectoid XII, 2012, with honeycomb background.  The engine exhaust was done using a "film grain" filter, and glows with multi-layer opacity tricks.]

I was content with that for almost two years.  In 2014, I decided to try something a little more ambitious: a 3D model.

Next: from vector image to 3D model . . . and back again.