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[jph wacheski]

Super cool!   I love the look, some sweet designs, and the sounds/music are great as well,. how do you generate your samples?  Do you have a tool to design them or do you write those defenition .txt files by hand?  I will have to play some more and will give better feedback later,. . thanks for building this!   

[Synnah]

Indiegames.com are giving some pretty major coverage to the Cockpit competition at the moment! okkuplektor was their pick for today.

http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2009/04/freeware_game_pick_okkuplektor.html

[György Straub]

got around to play it in Windows and with a mouse. very awesome! the atmosphere is amazing.

two things:
- sounds didn't seem to be working at places (firing & c. -- the ambients were alright)
- having to start all over again after dying is cruel.

[Gainsworthy]

0rel! I admit, I haven't been follwoing the Cockpit Compo too closely - First Person 3D games, whilst still in alpha stages tend to mess with my mind/computer a little too much for my tastes. Was waiting for the final copies. But, I kinda had to try this out.

Don't know how you do it, but you always pull off something brilliant and rather unique. Your games certainly have a common "feel" between them. I guess it's the crisp pixels and delicious ambient sound, combined with a good ol' fashioned arcade feel.


Regardless, this is no different! A really slick, fun shooter. I especially liked the digression into the quiet stage without shooting or enemies. I, uh, couldn't figure out how to get to the exit, though. I will later! I must investigate rumours of a boss.

Well done, again! Keep it up!

[Melly]

As far as atmosphere, visuals and level variety this game is ace. I couldn't get past the most exploration-focused level with the floating spike balls, though.

Most of the sounds didn't work for me. Firing and stuff like that. Usually I'd only hear the music.

Hope you fix this issue and I can play this game properly.

[Xion]

Charismatic Cockpits, competitor! A simple self sees such stupendous sights in this spectacular ssss...game.

for serious though this is incredible.


edit; also, I am stuck where Melly didn't get past.

[Space_man]

Aha!  I finally figured out how to finish that level where you're all getting stuck.  In the room with the maze-like stuff on the floor, I recommend you try flying around down there a bit...

Funnily enough, I had found the file that lists the levels and changed it to put the boss level first so I could try it, since I figured that that level was impossible.  Then I continued and found the way out of the level, and made it to the boss again... and died 

edit:  Gah, almost forgot to say that the game is awesome.  I really like the visual style, the movement is smooth and it's really fun.

[jph wacheski]

Wow, I would buy that 'explosion sound' patch screen-printed on a tshirt as it looks too cool!  I have also been searching for a decent free (preferably open source) midi sequencer that just does the basics,. as ZGE has midi suport for playback of its internal realtime sound enegin however I have not found anything I like to compose with,. so my games have been suffering form a lack of musics,. its a bit better now that we have arrays,. and we are talking about going to an internal sequencer type system,. . time will tell on that one,. but  am going to check out Seq24 thanks for that too! If you do decide to work on the midi app I would be happy to participate in testing, design, and any other input/help you may like,.
one thing I really dig about your game is the atmosphere, it is consistant and beutiful,. the whole thing works well together.  cheers mate!

[Ivan]

Really nice game, 0rel!

I really like that you limited the resolution. It also, like Fifth's wagon game, reminds me of Magic Carpet in its aesthetics and also of another Bullfrog game, Hi-Octane. The music really fits the game too.

I really like the feel of the controls, smooth and responsive and overall a great experience.

One small pet peeve is maybe you can add a progress bar to the sound generation in the beginning. I ended up quitting it a few times because I couldn't wait and had something to do. It would have been nice to know when it was going to finish.

[muku]

I really want to try this, but I just get an empty console window and an "unknown software exception (0xc000001d) at 0x00462db8" when I run play.bat This is Win2k with a Radeon 9500.

[trabitboy]

well I'm sooooooo impressed and satisfied by this game

just realized the world badly needed a trippy abstract rez descent like 

[trabitboy]

hi, just wanted to drop a word to say
the game works only one 1 computer out of 3 I tried it on ,
even the no sound version 
"system cannot execute the specified program"

so:
worked on my 2 year old laptop with windows mediacenter
doesn't work on my 1 year old xp desktop from work
doens't work on my 4 year old xp laptop ( quite decent )

it would be cool that such a great piece of work could be sampled by everyone 

If I can help for more testing, I'm ready.

[trabitboy]

hi!
the mingw version runs fine on the old laptop ,
but you should distribute openal32.dll with your game maybe
( I can't install it on my work pc, prevents it from running ).

interesting for the mingw workaround, I use codeblocks/mingw
and I didn't seem to run into all of this when I send a test build
to various friends.
a lot of entries seem to suffer from the vc++ "pickiness" ?

for gameplay:
u definitely nailed the descent feel, I was instantly at home and compelled to play 

EDIT:
sticking the openal32.dll in the same folder as your game.exe
made it run beautifully on my work desktop,
bringing it really close to a release you can just unzip and play 

[Will Vale]

The initial level reminds me of Zarch for some reason. I got confused and thought the X meant I wasn't supposed to destroy the castle, so I waited around for something to protect it from... Luckily I figured it out in the end.

The whole thing is deeply stylish, I'm glad I got to play it. I think it does suffer a bit from the ease with which you can avoid the baddies on some levels - it feels like you should be shooting but it's more efficient just to dodge them and head for the exit.

Have you tried rendering at 2x the resolution and downsampling? I have a soft spot for very low res polygonal visuals with antialiasing, and I think it'd look good on this game

[Will Vale]

here an exe with enabled FSAA

That's exactly what I was thinking of, thanks so much! I really like that version but I can see why you'd want to stick to crispness for the official release.

Regarding the tutorial, I think drawing the frame around targets in red would probably have been all the clue I needed on level 1. Your ideas about bonuses, scoring and style sound like they would work really well and add lots of reasons to go back and replay levels after the initial rush of just getting to the end.

You can also make a really good game out of finding ways to effectively cheat to get to the end quickly - see the driving/puzzle Gripshift for an example of this taken to the extreme.

Will

[trabitboy]

okay. i've finally managed to compile all in "/MT mode" with MSVC, so that that new build should run independently of any special DLLs too, now (besides OpenAL...).
 to say if it breaks again, i hunt bugs with joy.

Hi,
new build starts on work desktop,
but fails on older xp laptop 

other weird open al behaviour I didn't catch last time:
it starts on my work pc when I fetch the openal dll directly in the directory,
BUT it doesn't output any sound 

[trabitboy]

weird... - the same message ("system cannot execute the specified program") again, on your older xp laptop?

no, crashes harder, window to send an error report to MS
will try your latest builds

OpenAL simply failed!
at least for small downloadable games.

I agree , scares me to use it too;
I try to produce things you can just unzip and dbl click .

[Greender]

The decompressing is at the start is kind of annoying, other than that great game, very smooth controls.

[moi]

Awesome game, you rank first on my list at the moment (tested 2/3 of the games so far).
Yeah the uncompressing is very annoying (I almost quit before it ended)  and pointless, next time just upload the uncompressed sound samples.

[Synnah]

I actually quite liked the audio rendering at the start, but that's probably because I'm a music nerd. It's not decompressing all of the audio files, it's taking sequencer information from text files, and using samples (Which it does seem to decompress from ogg to WAV format) to render the music files as WAVs. Which is awesome, and it prompted me to poke around in the audio folder. That said, it probably would have made a bit more sense to include the music files as OGGs (There are about 50MB of WAVs, which would equate to about 5MB of OGGs); unless, of course, there was a technical reason why you couldn't use OGGs in-game.