Vincent selects only the finest pine and birch trees from the hills of the Australian outback for his maps and transports them to Germany to be dried to just the right moisture level before having them brought to the United States, where they are cut into lumber and made ready for their final transport to his workshop nestled in the foot hills of San Jose, CA.  Vincent painstakingly carves each and every map by hand until every last detail is complete.  Not a single step of the process is rushed, which ensures the highest standards of quality.  Upon completion, the map is photographed, digitized and the original carving is destroyed.  Finally, each map is carefully uploaded here for your examination.  Vincent's Hand-Made Maps:  Quality is only the beginning.

      Ha, ha, I kid.  I'm not a nutball, I just make XPilot maps.  For those of you who just heard of this place, I'd like to welcome you to my XPilot maps page.  Here are all the maps I have that I consider good enough for the general XPilot public.  I hope you like what you see here.  Each zipfile contains the map file (no defaults file is necessary).  Feel free to download whatever you want.  All my maps are 100% free, just like XPilot.  If you want to send me a file just attach it to an email to me or point me to your FTP/web site.  In addition, I'll also put any experimental maps or maps that I'm having trouble with here (in "Broken Maps") so you guys can put in your two cents about them.

      Also, don't forget to check out my "Cool Maps" section for a collection of maps by other authors.  Feel free to mail me if you have any questions or comments.  Thanks for stopping by and just click on any image to download the zipfile.

11/15/2007 - Historical note

      I'll go ahead and toot my own horn and mention that I started making maps in the early to mid 1990's.  Not that I'm that unusual in XPilot terms.  In fact, you could really say I discovered the game rather late.  For example, the Blood's Music II map that came with the 4.5.4 distribution has a created date of 1995.  That basically means that the original Blood's Music (created in 1945 using only a stone tablet and a blunt chisel) was already totally old and over-played by the time I trashed my very first poorly maneuvered ship into my very first wall.

      So, while all the real XPilot players were playing Blood's Music blindfolded, shooting accurately at each other by sense of smell, I was just learning the game.  I was making maps with the old XMapEdit whose most advanced feature was the line tool (or possibly the grow function).  Also, you could only define a handful of key parameters from within the editor itself.  The remainder of the server options had to be defined in a seperate defaults file with a text editor (we also had hand-crank computers and Etch A Sketches for monitors back then).  I added my efforts to the seemingly very few of us who were trying to introduce some fresh blood to the XPilot map world.  Speaking of blood, I'll go ahead and admit right now that I was jealous of Blood's Music's popularity when I started and aspired to make a map that would be good enough to replace it.

      Over the years, we all worked on developing the map editors.  As XMapEdit grew to accomodate all the current server options I made my small contribution to it in the way of a minor, mostly organizational "tune-up".  Later, Jarrod Miller kicked total ass with the development of MapXpress.  I got envolved with Jarrod and his efforts for a while, testing the editor, pointing out bugs and whatnot.  I even offered to type up a more comprehensive and cross-referenced version of the of the map options for the compiled HTML manual but life got in the way and that never came to pass.  Sorry about that, Jarrod.  Nonetheless, I felt that Jarrod's efforts had created a solid, comprehensive editor that was both powerful and easy to use.  More recently, a polygon map editor has been developed.  Honestly, I don't know much about it.  From what I have gathered it doesn't sound like a bad idea but (in its current state) it seems rather fussy and far from being perfected, as most works in progress tend to be.

      So, after over a decade of on and off interest in the game, I'm back making my maps again.  Still, Blood's Music is everywhere on the meta server but I'm not jealous anymore.  I'm just tired of seeing it.  We have great map editors at our disposal and I know I'm not the only one who's making an effort to come up with new and different maps.  I'd just like to see Blood's retired to some sort of XPilot Hall of Fame where it belongs and have some new type of map step up to the plate.

      That's it for my two cents on the subject.  In the spirit of historical musings, I've researched my maps, included a created date on each of their listings and put them in chronological order.  Day to day I typically can't remember most things in terms of their chronology so whenever I'm focused enough to actually accomplish something like this I jump at the chance.  If you're interested I've also included a few specific historical comments on the map listings where appropriate.  Okay, I'll shut the hell up now.  As always, thanks for stopping by (and thanks for having the patience to read this whole thing!).