Super Unofficial DiRT 4 Thread (PS4/XB1/PC)

But there are only licensing issues with Finland,Greece and Monte Carlo? So what about Germany ? Thats the only Location I haven´t read anything around the web...maybe it is the mystery location?
 
Looks cool, but this game only had 1 full year of development so expect it to be very shallow.

To be fair, Grid Autosport only came out a year after Grid 2 and was a pretty well fleshed out product (weird cockpit view aside), so I think Dirt 4 will be alright in that regard.

I'm looking forward to this, primarily because I never got the full potential out of Dirt Rally. It's not that I didn't enjoy it; it's just that I never really sat down and hammered through the career like all of the other instalments. I usually just set up a quick stage or two, or a rallycross race in the free play mode. The physics are solid, but I found them more frustrating at times when I just wanted to sit down and blast through a few stages for fun. I'm glad D4 will bring back the more simcadey type of handling model. It'd be good if it incorporated certain elements from the full-on sim handling as well though.
 
Thats the only Location I haven´t read anything around the web...maybe it is the mystery location?
"Mystery" seems to be an event randomiser rather than an as-yet-undisclosed location. Everything that Codemasters has published points to there only being five locations.

But there are only licensing issues with Finland,Greece and Monte Carlo? So what about Germany ?
I don't see why there would be an issue with Greece. The Acropolis hasn't featured on the WRC calendar for years. It's currently part of the ERC, but as far as I am aware, nobody has the ERC licence. Rather, I'm guessing that Codemasters cut it and replaced it with Australia because Australia is more recognisable as a rally location.

A thought about user generated tracks - will the co-driver calls be accurate?
They would have to. The sport hinges on the use of pace notes, and so Your Stage only works if you get accurate calls. No doubt there is going to be some kind of algorithm that identifies the sequence of bends and hazards and inserts the relevant notes. It probably won't be bespoke the way Dirt Rally's notes were, but as the tutorial videos point out, the corner notes are based on the severity of the corner itself. They're not a suggested speed or gear.

The key part will be to get the timings of the notes right to give the player time to react. There's a few places in Dirt Rally - particularly in Sweden - where the calls come very late even on the default setting and you're practically driving blind.
 
"Mystery" seems to be an event randomiser rather than an as-yet-undisclosed location. Everything that Codemasters has published points to there only being five locations.
There's also the possibility of "Mystery" being a DLC placeholder, something I wouldn't rule out in this day and age.
 
To be fair, Grid Autosport only came out a year after Grid 2 and was a pretty well fleshed out product (weird cockpit view aside), so I think Dirt 4 will be alright in that regard.

To be honest, 95% of the content in Grid AS is already in Grid 2 and previous Codies games (either Grid 1 or their F1 games). It's not that much work just to rework the physics engine and write a few lines of code for the career mode (just car/track selection and some fairly simple banners for the championship names). You can tell they did not have much time because the menus are so barebones compared to the garage backgrounds in Grid 1/2/Dirt 2/F1 games. Having said that, GAS rectified everything that is wrong with Grid 2 so if you skipped Grid 2 it will feel like a pretty good game, even though it's basically just a rushed apology.

Dirt 4 from a content and menu presentation perspective at least seemed to build from Dirt Rally and enhance it. I daresay they have been planning this game from before DR, but was just using DR to gauge public interest in a return to pure sim. Because DR was so well received they just combined the content that they have with DR's physics engine. So I have some confidence that it won't be as barebones as GAS was.

They would have to. The sport hinges on the use of pace notes, and so Your Stage only works if you get accurate calls. No doubt there is going to be some kind of algorithm that identifies the sequence of bends and hazards and inserts the relevant notes. It probably won't be bespoke the way Dirt Rally's notes were, but as the tutorial videos point out, the corner notes are based on the severity of the corner itself. They're not a suggested speed or gear.

The key part will be to get the timings of the notes right to give the player time to react. There's a few places in Dirt Rally - particularly in Sweden - where the calls come very late even on the default setting and you're practically driving blind.

Yes that's what I'm worried about. It's all good to auto generate pace notes based on corner severity etc, but that means nothing it it doesn't translate when you're driving. It would be awesome if for every track created you have to drive it once from start to finish to generate the pace notes, sort of like doing your own recce. Then you can modify the calls to be earlier/later, change severity, add in hazards, etc.
 
Holy crap Nicky Grist is going to be the co-driver in Dirt 4!. This alone will make the game 10x better.

I actually just noticed something while playing Dirt Rally yesterday. The way the co-driver calls out the pace notes is slightly different to the way Grist's pace notes were called in the CMR games. Grist would always call the distance and gear number before the direction, but Dirt Rally's is a hybrid of the CMR games and the PlayStation WRC games (calling the direction before the gear number, and calling the gear number instead of the corner severity level). After growing up playing the CMR games, and playing no other Dirt games except for the third one and Rally, hearing a change in the way the calls were made forced me to readjust, and with this news, I can finally revert to the system which I'm used to.







That is, if his style has remained the same. :scared:
 
To be honest, 95% of the content in Grid AS is already in Grid 2 and previous Codies games (either Grid 1 or their F1 games). It's not that much work just to rework the physics engine and write a few lines of code for the career mode (just car/track selection and some fairly simple banners for the championship names). You can tell they did not have much time because the menus are so barebones compared to the garage backgrounds in Grid 1/2/Dirt 2/F1 games. Having said that, GAS rectified everything that is wrong with Grid 2 so if you skipped Grid 2 it will feel like a pretty good game, even though it's basically just a rushed apology.

I don't doubt Autosport was rushed; as you say, it was practically an apology that came straight out of nowhere. As I mentioned though, it didn't feel rushed. Whilst a lot of the content was recycled from other Codies games, that's a practice that's been used in a lot of their more detailed titles in the past. Dirt 2 had Subaru and Solstice drift cars repurposed as Trailblazer models. The Mustang in Dirt 3 and Showdown is taken from the first Grid. Even in Dirt Rally, the Corsa and Clio rallycross cars are just touched up versions from the original Dirt.

I think the simplistic menus was Codemasters' way of listening to the criticism about the good looking but entirely superfluous RV/team trailer/garage style they had in their other games.
 
I actually just noticed something while playing Dirt Rally yesterday. The way the co-driver calls out the pace notes is slightly different to the way Grist's pace notes were called in the CMR games. Grist would always call the distance and gear number before the direction, but Dirt Rally's is a hybrid of the CMR games and the PlayStation WRC games (calling the direction before the gear number, and calling the gear number instead of the corner severity level). After growing up playing the CMR games, and playing no other Dirt games except for the third one and Rally, hearing a change in the way the calls were made forced me to readjust, and with this news, I can finally revert to the system which I'm used to.







That is, if his style has remained the same. :scared:


That is funny.. I never think about the pace notes or how they are read.. I just start playing the game and get used to it and react. Now I am going to have to go look at some youtube videos later and hear the differences.
 
I definitely prefer having the number as the severity than the gear but there were some inaccurate numbers in dirt rally. Severity is more opinion based and different for everyone.
 
I definitely prefer having the number as the severity than the gear but there were some inaccurate numbers in dirt rally. Severity is more opinion based and different for everyone.

Call me stubborn, but once things have been done a particular way, I prefer to always have it that way. The PlayStation 2 WRC games in particular threw me off because at the time, I was a bigger rally fanatic than what I am now, also owning CMR 3, 4 and 2005. The muscle memory (?) would kick in and the familiarity would just override any sense of adjustment.

Then again, having not watched the tutorial videos and going by what @prisonermonkeys said about the pace notes being called according to corner severity, could mean one of two things: Grist didn't write and record pace notes for the Your Stage mode, or the developers had him change his style to fit the game. Either way, it could mean that the Evolution devs have had least contributed SOME input.
 
I actually just noticed something while playing Dirt Rally yesterday. The way the co-driver calls out the pace notes is slightly different to the way Grist's pace notes were called in the CMR games. Grist would always call the distance and gear number before the direction, but Dirt Rally's is a hybrid of the CMR games and the PlayStation WRC games (calling the direction before the gear number, and calling the gear number instead of the corner severity level). After growing up playing the CMR games, and playing no other Dirt games except for the third one and Rally, hearing a change in the way the calls were made forced me to readjust, and with this news, I can finally revert to the system which I'm used to.







That is, if his style has remained the same. :scared:

I've never used the pace note numbers as gear suggestions on Dirt Rally... I assumed they were severity indicators, because different cars will use different gears in each corner.
 
The number given in the notes is never a gear number, it's just the severity of the corner. You can use it as a guide for gear selection though, I often find that one gear higher than the number given works well in Dirt Rally.
 
http://blog.codemasters.com/dirt/04/co-driver-calls-explained/

DiRT-RALLY-pacenotes.jpg
 
http://blog.codemasters.com/dirt/04/co-driver-calls-explained/
The main difference with the notes in DiRT Rally is that we have used a new Level Design tool that studies the corner angles and gives us a pretty accurate first stab at a set of notes.

That's interesting, so automatically generating pace notes is something they've been working on and using since Dirt Rally. Hopefully that bodes well for the accuracy of notes in Dirt 4's stages.
 
The number given in the notes is never a gear number, it's just the severity of the corner. You can use it as a guide for gear selection though, I often find that one gear higher than the number given works well in Dirt Rally.
What I was referring to was the Codemasters rally games using the scale 1-6, with 1 being the slowest, 6 being the fastest, so it is similar to the car's current gear, as opposed to Evolution's WRC system (1-6, 1 being the fastest, 6 being the slowest). IIRC, WRC 2 had a selectable system where instead of the severity of the corner being called, the shape of the corner would be called instead (e.g. Square instead of 6, K instead of 4, etc.)
 
I always thought the numbers were actually gear numbers till I played DiRT Rally and they explained how this is a common misconception (the more you know).
 
I definitely prefer having the number as the severity than the gear but there were some inaccurate numbers in dirt rally. Severity is more opinion based and different for everyone.
I think there are several variables that affect corner severity, and not just the angle of the corner. Road width and lines of sight seem to play a role, too.
 
I went through it.. I was trying to figure out how online racing worked for the physics type (sim/arcade).

I saw a response for rally that it would be different leader boards, but did not see how it would work for say Buggie/Truck racing. Does that physics selection only exist for rally? or is it for all car types?

All cars. Appears that Sim and Gamer physics will be separated in online lobbies as well.
 
From what I have read, people who went to the reveal weren't allowed to record anything. They got sent short gameplay clips to use though.









 
Seems like a graphical step up from Dirt Rally, but the cockpit view still seems a bit fugly.

They're above everyone else in the Audio department, eargasm.
 
I'm really hoping that Landrush has been developed some more. It was pretty limited in Dirt 3, with only four circuits on offer. It's not my favourite mode by any means, but I felt that it was so limited that you could cut it out and people wouldn't notice.
 
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