DiRT Rally Thread

With the inclusion of the iconic Ford Focus (memories from CMR2.. feeling old guys) I'm literally dying for this game. Can't wait for a console release. Add the Martini livery and i would pay 100€ for it.
 
With the inclusion of the iconic Ford Focus (memories from CMR2.. feeling old guys) I'm literally dying for this game. Can't wait for a console release. Add the Martini livery and i would pay 100€ for it.

Yeah they said they couldn't get that livery which sucks, someone will make it as a PC mod though.

Edit: Someone has already, colour isn't perfect but not bad

aEgYyyP.jpg

vKMsF8l.jpg

7agYrKl.jpg

0pSdE91.jpg
 
Last edited:
These new Finland stages are absolutely awesome, literally the most fun I've ever had on a racing sim.

You just feel completely out of control the whole stage, its just a relentless spectacle of jumps as you bounce around at insane speeds and it feels like you are going to crash at every corner, its really exciting. I love the new cars, they are a blast to use on the new stages and they remind me of Colin Mcrae Rally 2004/5. The other cars, more specifically the Audi Sport Quattro are also a lot of fun.

I found these stages a lot easier than the other ones for some reason, I guess I'm good on light gravel.

f31d3f89da.jpg
 


I mainly noticed how he sometimes flies over crests completely sideways and still manages to pull the car back. Do that in real life and you wake up in the hospital if you're lucky. Seems like someone who would drive with aids off, so this makes me doubt the physics a bit.
 


I mainly noticed how he sometimes flies over crests completely sideways and still manages to pull the car back. Do that in real life and you wake up in the hospital if you're lucky. Seems like someone who would drive with aids off, so this makes me doubt the physics a bit.


They jump sideways in real life as well
 
Not as sideways as seen in this video at certain points. That would end up in an immediate roll.

You can roll it purely by sliding too fast and too sideways, but yeah the cars seem to get airborne too easily and unless you soften the suspension they bounce too much.
 
From their latest blog post, showing how much work they put into the co-driver calls for each stage (might explain why we don't get more unique stages).

We record a near perfect run of a track and sit @kick_up in the D-Box chair, strapped in with pace notes in hand, helmet on, much like a real world scenario. The car is launched and Paul calls out the notes, feeling every turn and crest. I then record the output of the driver’s headset in another helmet, so we get the real deal and not some fake processing we think it should sound like. This is what it sounds like.

Paul also has a set of ear buds under his balaclava to listen to the audio from the game, to give some volume to his voice at different stages of the track. As well as ear buds, Paul is literally shaking around in the D-Box. We have it set quite high in order to exaggerate the feedback from the track surface and force more energy into the seat giving Paul’s voice a more forced delivery.

Once we have completed a full run, we do it again. I don’t like audio in games to be repetitive, it detracts from the experience and the human voice is one of the most obvious sounds we pickup on as being false if heard too many times. We also use speed as a factor, at slower speeds the voice is less forced as we set the D-Box feedback lower to give the player some idea that they are having some input to virtual world around them. So we record a fast pace set of calls twice and a medium paced set of calls twice, and also one set of calls without any force through at all, so if you’re travelling under 10 mph, there’s literally no force coming through the voice and as you speed up it switches to the medium and then to the high.

Each track has a bespoke set of calls for that one track; no calls are reused on other tracks as it would break the flow of the performance. We wanted a visceral experience, and adding these small differences to the recording to the calls is one step closer to the overall experience becoming the one visceral experience we wanted to achieve.

http://blog.codemasters.com/dirt/10/dirt-rally-road-book-021015/
 
The road is gravel, the car will tend to slide. Dirt Rally feels pretty damn good to me.
Fast forward to the jump that comes up at 1:37 , the near crash at 1:58, hairy moment at 5:20 and the jump at 6:50. Car's balance is totally unsettled in those moments, over the jumps going almost completely sideways and he still recovers with one move of the steering wheel.
 
Fast forward to the jump that comes up at 1:37 , the near crash at 1:58, hairy moment at 5:20 and the jump at 6:50. Car's balance is totally unsettled in those moments, over the jumps going almost completely sideways and he still recovers with one move of the steering wheel.
Dirt Rally may be more forgiving than IRL, it's a game. As long as you can keep the tires on the road the car can for the most part be saved (within reason). What really matters to me is it believable (is it close enough) and is it fun - in this case yes. I can't argue (not my intent here) how close it is or not.
I'm not a big rally guy - never paid close attention to the sport but if it has four wheels and goes fast I will watch it IRL and play virtually.
These few clips aren't added as exact comparisons to explain your examples, but they do illustrate how forgiving IRL rally cars (well-known to the fans) are with their incredible suspensions. The pros make it look easy.
 
I don't think anyone ever claimed Dirt Rally was perfectly accurate to life, no sim game can claim that in the slightest. Even in the game the guy above jumping sideways got very lucky, i've had massive accidents from less. Going over jumps in a high speed car in Dirt you really need to balance the car before you hit the peak (with brake/throttle), and try to avoid any lateral weight balance changes of direction as you approach it and immedietly after landing, or you will lose the car as soon as you land.

It's pretty good, not perfect of course but if you expected perfection you would not be sim racing.
 
I've only run a few Finnish stages, but you definitely crash the car plenty if you're not doing it right. He may have recovered in that video, but a bunch of it was luck. It also depends on the car. Far less forgiving in a FWD or RWD car.
 
It's pretty good, not perfect of course but if you expected perfection you would not be sim racing.
Well honestly i'm aiming for as much perfection physics wise as i can get. Would be better if in the above instances the car would lose control like it would in real life, then people would drive a bit more conservatively knowing one mistake is the end of your stage. Sure it might be more fun being able to drive through the woods like a madman, but if it were to be more unforgiving one would be proud to have gotten through the stage without accidents, something real rally pilots have to worry about too.

I don't want to nitpick though, DIRT is a fun game and I can barely make it through a stage without an accident as it is now :dopey:
 
Well honestly i'm aiming for as much perfection physics wise as i can get. Would be better if in the above instances the car would lose control like it would in real life, then people would drive a bit more conservatively knowing one mistake is the end of your stage. Sure it might be more fun being able to drive through the woods like a madman, but if it were to be more unforgiving one would be proud to have gotten through the stage without accidents, something real rally pilots have to worry about too.

I don't want to nitpick though, DIRT is a fun game and I can barely make it through a stage without an accident as it is now :dopey:
The challenge is balancing the fun with realism. if anyone has tried RBR you no what i mean. for those that haven't Richard Burns is in many ways less forgiving which can lead to a lot of frustration this sometimes takes away from the fun. Dirt rally has got the balance right i think, it can be frustration but ultimately fun and rewarding when done right.
 
They really need to fix the Co-Driver calls on the Greece stages in particular, a lot of his calls (in the last two stages especially) are either really badly timed or just flat out wrong. It would be great if the option to modify his calls was available (I don't mean the timing, I mean the actual information). At this point it's either make his calls come out later which gives you a barrage of information about the next sequence of corners coming up much later or leaving it and just praying that he doesn't call out really important information late (Right 5 tightens to 2 for example, by the time he's said tightens to 2 I'm already entering at a pace of 5).

Another issue I've had is some important information is just missing, in stage 6 I was told Left 5 only to hit a massive rock on the outside, which you would think would be a pretty crucial piece of information

Solutions: Give the option to modify his calls and/or actually show all of the important information on the hud (for example instead of showing Right 5 tightens to 2 as just "Right 5" how about "Right 5 + 2"
 
One of my only issues with the calls is that there is a lot of wiggle room in

"turn right one"
"hairpin right"
"acute right"

And sometimes a hairpin is actually a rather sweeping right two...and I end up nose facing the damn apex because I got a little heavy on the handbrake thinking I was going into a hairpin.
 
Yeah the pace notes are fairly terrible, but they said it's partly because they are designed to work for all of the cars and obviously there's a huge difference in speed between the slowest and fastest cars. If you are cautious enough you can rely purely on the notes to set a decent time but you really need to learn the stage to pick up on the bad calls.
 
A fair few of the pacenotes are misleading and/or badly timed, if you haven't seen the corner before (and sometimes even if you have, if you're following his notes) you will just end up in a tree because the pace note was wrong, if you don't have faith in the pacenotes and drive slow... Well then you're slow, at Masters level you often have to pretty much have mastered the stage to an alien level to win anyway.

Some of the Finland ones are completely useless though, he's telling them 3-4 corners ahead of time, even with the settings for him to call them later.. It's like you're approaching a corner and then he's reading out the next 3 corners while you're going through it, and then he shuts up for a bit and reads out more corners.

It's so inconsistent and it's so far ahead of where you are on the track that it's impossible to focus on where you are.
 
A fair few of the pacenotes are misleading and/or badly timed, if you haven't seen the corner before (and sometimes even if you have, if you're following his notes) you will just end up in a tree because the pace note was wrong, if you don't have faith in the pacenotes and drive slow... Well then you're slow, at Masters level you often have to pretty much have mastered the stage to an alien level to win anyway.

Some of the Finland ones are completely useless though, he's telling them 3-4 corners ahead of time, even with the settings for him to call them later.. It's like you're approaching a corner and then he's reading out the next 3 corners while you're going through it, and then he shuts up for a bit and reads out more corners.

It's so inconsistent and it's so far ahead of where you are on the track that it's impossible to focus on where you are.
I would disagree the stacking of pace notes is extremely useful at full chat. Finaland has fine gravel which means at sped you slide more over the surface. So knowing what comes next helps keep the car balanced.
 
I still have absolutely no understanding the pace notes. I work off the symbols and because it relays them in advance I often turn a corner the wrong way as the arrow stated that I should go left, when actually the left corner was after the right hand corner I screwed up because I thought it was the left corner. It would be cool if they were adjustable so the symbols didn't show in advance, but when you were on the corner that symbol is for.

Also I'm addicted to the Lancia Stratos, I love that thing even if it does scare me.

329dac412f.jpg
 
I still have absolutely no understanding the pace notes. I work off the symbols and because it relays them in advance I often turn a corner the wrong way as the arrow stated that I should go left, when actually the left corner was after the right hand corner I screwed up because I thought it was the left corner. It would be cool if they were adjustable so the symbols didn't show in advance, but when you were on the corner that symbol is for.

Also I'm addicted to the Lancia Stratos, I love that thing even if it does scare me.

329dac412f.jpg

I keep forgetting to get that skin, easily one of the best cars 👍
 
I still have absolutely no understanding the pace notes. I work off the symbols and because it relays them in advance I often turn a corner the wrong way as the arrow stated that I should go left, when actually the left corner was after the right hand corner I screwed up because I thought it was the left corner. It would be cool if they were adjustable so the symbols didn't show in advance, but when you were on the corner that symbol is for.

Also I'm addicted to the Lancia Stratos, I love that thing even if it does scare me.

329dac412f.jpg
The sound from the cockpit is also very good. It is in all cars.


Question:
I have a G25 hooked up. In Assetto Corsa the game detects that I have the H shifter connected and uses it correctly for each car.

In Dirt Rally I have to constantly tweak the controls and change setting when I switch from a sequential shifted car to stick 'n clutch car.
 
I would disagree the stacking of pace notes is extremely useful at full chat. Finaland has fine gravel which means at sped you slide more over the surface. So knowing what comes next helps keep the car balanced.

I'm going around a corner and he tells me the next will be a square right, as I go down the straight and try to prepare for the technical square right he has just layed off a list of 3 corners after the square right.. I haven't even done the square right and he's already told me the next 3.

This is extremely confusing and requires you to use brain power to think far ahead, rather than focussing on the terrain and the matter at hand.. Or rather it causes you to zone out and drive purely by visuals because there is too much information.

All the other stages are well timed for the most part, with information relayed with only 1-2 corners in advance, most of the time the corner you're approaching is the corner he has just told you about, this is good. 3 corners ahead of the corner you're approaching is terrible.
 
Back