Dirt Rally
DiRT Rally Dev Diary
Hey guys, we've got some awesome new behind-the-scenes footage from the DiRT team! Watch the DiRT team talk about the reasons behind making the latest DiRT title a more focussed, more challenging rally and rallycross game that takes the series back towards its early heritage in the Colin McRae games. They go over DiRT Rally’s Steam Early Access programme, and how the feedback process with the DiRT community helped shape the game into a thrilling and authentic racing game (that's you guys!)
Thanks for all of your help with making the game what is it today - and enjoy the video!
DiRT Rally Update - Version 1.04
At just after 11am GMT this morning, we released a small patch for DiRT Rally.
The patch will lay the groundwork for adding two new languages - Portuguese Brazilian and Russian.
New content coming to DiRT Rally!
Great news! We’re delighted to be able to confirm that there will be additional content coming to DiRT Rally on April 5th, 2016. To showcase this content we’ve put together a brand new trailer - which you can take a look at now at dirtgame.com.
In addition to the content we’ve added during DiRT Rally’s Steam Early Access programme, you’ll now be able to enjoy some pretty substantial new additions to the game when April arrives. New Classic Mini and Super 1600 series will introduce the thrills of rallycross from the beginning of the game, and we’ve added 21 advanced rally driving video guides which will help gamers maximise their rallying performance.
For the first time in the game, you’ll also be able to experience the vintage full gravel surface at Pikes Peak. And starting April 5th, you’ll also be able to take on Pikes Peak in the iconic Peugeot 208 T16 Pikes Peak. Not only this, but three of Colin McRae’s most iconic liveries will join his Focus livery – allowing you to relive the exploits of a legendary rally champion and icon of motorsport. We’ve been waiting a long time to be able to bring you the Impreza livery – and the iconic yellow and blue design is now back at its spiritual home with DiRT Rally.
The DiRT team have also added seven extra cars, including some huge (and most-requested) fan favourites. The vehicles in question are...
- Peugeot 208 T16 Pikes Peak
- Renault 5 Turbo
- Renault Alpine A110
- Opel Corsa Super 1600
- Peugeot 207 S1600
- Renault Clio S1600
- Mini Classic Rallycross
DiRT Rally is available now on Steam, and this exciting additional content will be powersliding onto players’ desktops on April 5th 2016. Check out our launch video and our original post for some high quality pictures and video of these new cars in action!
As ever, please stop by the Steam Community Hub, the forums, our Facebook page or on Twitter to let us know what you think of this new content.
And remember – if in doubt, flat-out!
DiRT Rally Update - Version 1.03
- Performance when Weather is set to Low should improve.
- Leagues will now use a set of stock engineers. The option to use Career Engineers as an option will be going live on the website later today.
- There are various tweaks and fixes for the audio in Sweden.
- Rallycross tracks have been allocated more memory, to prevent cases where they forget to load.
DiRT Rally adds SimXperience AccuForce support
To deliver the optimum ‘out-the-box’ experience when using the AccuForce Pro, we have provided a preset as part of the game that can be fully customised to support players' own button and force feedback configurations. We have also added our own developer-recommended SimXperience AccuForce Pro Force Feedback preset to DiRT Rally’s Steam Workshop here, and we highly recommend giving it a try.
A spokesperson at SimXperience said of the collaboration, 'having AccuForce integration built into DiRT Rally means a lot to us here at SimXperience and our customers. It was a pleasure to collaborate with the development team and we look forward to having a long term relationship with not only the DiRT dev team, but the teams that develop the Formula One titles as well.'
Find out more about the SimXperience AccuForce steering wheel.
DiRT Rally Update - Version 1.02
<*>We’ve fixed a number of co driver call issues in German, French, Italian and Spanish.
<*>We’ve found some parts lying around in the back of the service areas so you can now upgrade your Hyundai Rally Car.
<*>Need more snow in your life? Custom championships now include Sweden.
<*>Fixed a missing Italian text string in the part failure message.
<*>Fixed a number of graphical issues including; Opaque windows on Rallycross AI cars, a corrupt texture after partly detaching the rear bumper in the rain, some weird flickering in bonnet cam when switching the Virtual Rear View Mirror on and some glowing thing on Holjes.
DiRT Rally - Version 1.0 and Winter Wonderland Update
Yes, as of today, DiRT Rally is officially leaving Early Access and launching on Steam. It’s been a hell of a ride and we’re so glad you’ve been able to join us along the road to launch. Between you, you’ve clocked up over 98 million kilometres so far!
Today’s Steam launch brings with it the Winter Wonderland update, which delivers a new rally set in the snow and ice of the Varmland region of Sweden to the game. These snow-filled stages are known for their snow banks and we’ve been hard at work on new soft edge tech that simulates the density of snow. As a result, you can now lean on the snow banks when pushing for those stage records.
The update also brings two new cars to the game, the Hyundai Rally and the Volkswagen Polo Rally. These cars are the most recent additions to the pinnacle of the sport and they are the perfect way to round off our Early Access programme.
The Winter Wonderland update also sees the introduction of Steam Workshop support that allows players to share Car Setup & Force Feedback settings. You can find a guide for this here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=570805193 You can get started with settings from our simulation team here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=570797271
We’ve also made improvements and refinements made to Global Leaderboards and League support.
Here’s the rundown of other stuff that’s new this month:
- The Group B RWD, Hillclimb and Kit Cars have been upgraded to v2 handling.
- Now that all cars are up to v2 spec, the Self Aligning Torque has been re-balanced to support the new handling
- We found the spanners and wrenches that adjust the seats in all of your cars. Mind your head!
- The Logitech G920 is now fully supported.
- We also changed the mapping for Gears, Look Back, Clutch and Replay on the Logitech G29.
- The Clutch, Look Up and Seat Adjustment keys have been remapped on QWERTY / AZERTY keyboards to save your fingers and thumbs
- The SimXperience AccuForce Pro Steering System is now fully supported.
- You can now tune your immersion levels by customising your OSD options, choosing between On, Countdowns Only and Off.
- The Logitech G29 wheel is now correctly listed in the controller preset menu.
- Custom Championships now reward you with the correct number of credits.
- There’s a new EULA to sign when you boot the game, which asks you to kindly behave yourself when you’re playing with others.
- Your favourite pet mouse has learnt a new trick, and can now change the livery on your car.
- If you own an Owner’s Club event, you will now correctly own the Owned achievement.
- If you pledge a wedge to an online Wager Event and the event ends while you’re on stage, we’ll give you your CR back.
- Your Oculus Rift can now be toggled to lock the horizontal orientation. Look for a flag in the hardware configuration file.
- Sliders on the Advanced Racing Wheel Options screen now increment at the same rate as the Steering and Pedal calibration screen.
- Your Service Crews are back from their training course and will now correctly setup your car for multi-location events.
- Stopped one set of Rallycross results from appearing on a Rally leaderboard.
- You no longer need to hold the headlight control to activate your lights. You can now just tap that.
- Windows accounts with accented and non-latin characters will now correctly save game settings.
- Fixed a weird bug where the camera would briefly flick back to the default position at the start of a stage after customising the seat position.
- @Kick_Up will now politely and calmly inform you if your wheels fall off, and if you’re going the wrong way.
As ever, please stop by the forums and let us know what you think of version 1.0 and how you think we did in early access. We couldn’t have done it without you!
Love,
The DiRT Team x
DiRT Rally - Modern Masters Update
The update also sees the introduction of the R4 class to DiRT Rally. Featuring the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X and the Subaru Impreza WRX STI 2011, this class represents cars from two of the most iconic manufacturers in modern rallying.
In addition, as part of our continued commitment to Early Access the Modern Masters pack sees the Group B 4WD and Group A classes receiving the latest handling updates. We’ve also been hard at work adding community requested features as well as fixing a number of known issues.
Here’s the list of what’s new this month:
New R4 class with 2 cars (Subaru Impreza WRX STI & Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X)
2 new cars added to 2000s class (Ford Focus RS Rally & Citroën C4 Rally)
v.2 Car Handling on R4, Group B 4WD and Group A
Additions and Community Requests:
Stage distance and elevation is now shown in stage information screen
Steering rotation in cockpit now matches actions of player when the driver arms are not shown.
Manual control for headlights and wipers
New liveries featured on some cars including the Repsol livery on the Lancia Delta
Countdown timer added for the last 60 seconds of a Rallycross race
Grid Order and Assists added to session options in PVP
Player preferences is now available in the Lobby and Online Service Area
· Fixes
o Fixed the CPU detection so the correct thread strategy is chosen for your PC. This fixes the stuttering issues that we may have introduced in v0.8, sorry about that!
o The achievement “Visceral... but in the correct meaning of the word” is now only unlockable when meeting the required criteria. This should mean it is a proper challenge to unlock again.
o The timing of some co-driver calls for Finland have been adjusted, they won’t be as early in some places. Also, they’ve got a bit braver so they’ve raised their volume a bit too.
o Advanced Custom Wheel configurations are now saving correctly, Clutch deadzone and saturation settings will now be saved with wheel settings too. Yay!.
o Animal protection services have been on the phone so we’ve had to move the wildlife on some stages to safety.
o Issues with systems crashing at the start of a stage when using AMD Crossfire are now resolved.
o The game will save after you receive your rewards from online events – yeah, they didn’t do that before.
o Fixed a crash that would occur if you exited to the menus in a Rallycross event at the semi-finals .
o Fixed the Logitech G29 actionmap so you can navigate the menus correctly – we finally got hold of one to test it out.
o Fixed repair puncture OSD text remaining on screen after the player retires.
o Fixed the wrong points being displayed for entrants when any of the reverse grid options were enabled in PvP.
o “Gotta Get Me One of These” and “Any Given Sunday” achievements both now unlock when completed in any relevant online event.
o Spectating another player crash at high speed in PVP will no longer break the camera changing system.
o The mouse cursor will now hide when the mouse is not moved for a short period of time, solving the issue where the mouse cursor would remain on screen when played in windowed mode.
o AI difficulty levels should now be working within league play.
Feel free to stop by on the forums and let us know what you think or just to say hi!
Love,
The DiRT Team
DiRT Rally - Flying Finland Update
Add to this a new game mode and loads of fixes and features and this pack is almost as big as those Finnish jumps and crests.
Oh, and did we mention mouse support for the menus? You did want that right...?
So here is what’s new:
- 12 new rally stages near Jämsä, Finland
- All new 2000s vehicle class
- 2 new cars - Subaru Impreza 2001 and Ford Focus RS Rally 2001
- Custom Championships – You can now tweak the number of events, stages and AI difficulty. This will mean that you can set up an event that suits the amount of time you have available and get rewarded accordingly.
- Mouse Support! – Yep you asked for it so here it is. It’s still a work in progress so please give us your feedback on how we can improve it.
- We’ve reworked the handling on our 60s, 70s, 80s RWD and 2010s classes – these changes have seen improvements to the way we model suspension and tyres, along with engine and aero rework they really make the cars feel a lot more dynamic to drive.
- We’ve updated the engine audio for the 1995 Subaru Impreza in the Group A class. We’d like to say a massive thank you to Ryan Champion for letting us use his awesome car for the recording!
- We’ve wrapped our replays so you can rewind from the start of a replay to watch the final section of your run much faster than you could before.
- We’ve added a new ‘Invite Friends’ option in the lobby to make it easier for you to get the people you want into your PVP races.
Here’s what we’ve fixed:
- The audio FX levels for the surfaces and kick up have been brought back so that you can hear all that gravely goodness.
- We sent our Rallycross AI drivers to the opticians so that they can now see when they need to avoid other cars when they are approaching the joker entrance.
- Now that they can see better they are also setting faster laps.
- We’ve fixed the camera clipping in certain camera angles when you changed the Field of View.
- We’ve made some Hyper threading fixes that should now prevent those annoying stuttering issues that some of you were having.
- We’ve stopped the Engineer contract lengths and costs from being affected when competing in league events.
- Toggling Push to Talk or enabling/disabling voice communications through the pause menu is now actually working.
- The Reset Timer has now been increased to 15 seconds when attempting to get back on track. I know we said that before but this time it is actually in.
- Cars will no longer roll over on the start in PVP races, ROFL.
- We’ve made sure that the cars are visible on the start line even when collisions are turned off in PVP – they will still ghost during the race though.
- Your PVP opponents won’t be showboating and driving around with the handbrake on anymore.
- The gear setup will no longer be changing between stages without a service area.
- We’ve fixed those odd camera angles that were being used in spectate mode.
- The miles driven using owned vehicles in PVP now accrue towards unlocking upgrades for that vehicle.
- When viewing a replay using an interior camera, the speedometers now show the correct speed for all vehicles.
- We’ve fixed a whole host of other stuff too but they were too boring to call out in this list.
Be sure to let us know how we’re doing, or just stop the forums by to say hello.
Stay mid over BIG jump!
The DiRT Team
<3
DiRT Rally Road Book - 11/09/15
Another week has passed and while things have obviously been a lot quieter on the community front we have been hard at work putting the v 0.71 patch out and getting our Flying Finland pack into shape.
One of the key elements of the game we are always working on in the studio are the Online Events, these have been tweaked and adjusted based on the way you have been playing them and we have even added in a bunch of new Online Events to offer you an alternative way to play the daily events. We added two of these new dailies to the v 0.7 PvP update so I’ll pass you over to the designer responsible for this area of the game so that he can explain a bit more about these new dailies.
Hangin’ with @Hatward
In the last couple of weeks we’ve been adding some new events to the Online Events playlist. Some of you have already noticed that new Daily Event configurations have been running, so I wanted to take some time to explain how these formats work.
Hillclimb and RallyX events have now both been added to the DiRT Daily. As with Rally events, you don’t need to own the vehicle to take part. This is a great way for you to test drive those cars before you spend your hard earned credits. RallyX events are a one off 4 lap race against the AI, with your final event time uploaded to the leaderboard. In Hillclimb you get two runs of a Pikes Peak stage, and we’ll take your fastest. Both of these events are scored in the three Tier structure you’re all familiar with from a traditional Daily.
In the second Daily slot, where we get a little experimental with the settings, we’ve added a new event type called the Delta Daily. In this event, you’re measured against the community Delta time, which is the average time set on each stage. Beating the Delta will earn you increased rewards. The Delta joins the existing Owner’s Club event in the playlist, and they alternate each day. You’ll need to own the vehicles for these events but they’ll net you more rewards.
We’ve also got a new Online Event type coming next month, but we’ll tell you more about that closer to the time. You might want to start saving your credits now…
Custom Championships
A few of you will have spotted me teasing some potential car content for the up and coming Flying Finland pack. It’s a pack that I am especially excited about and it is really taking shape now. On top of the Stages and the Cars we’ve also got some pretty cool Features lined up. I spoke a bit about Mouse Support last week but one of the bits I’m most excited about is the new Custom Championships.
As we’ve added more content in the game we have seen the championships getting longer and longer and when Finland comes along a Masters Championship will last for 5 rounds of 12 stages each. This is a pretty hefty commitment even for those of you who have a lot of time to put into DiRT Rally.
Custom Championships will allow you to set up your own Championships but still earn in game credits. You’ll be able to choose how many events are in a championship, how many stages are in an event and what difficulty the AI is. We’ll still be mixing up the locations, weather and times of day to keep you on your toes but we will work out a reward multiplier to make sure that you are getting the same sort of reward you would have got in our Championship Mode. An example of this would be doing a 5 round championship, with 6 stages each but compete with Masters Difficulty AI.
V 0.71 Patch
On Monday we put the new patch out. Here’s what we addressed:
- When you are setting up an Online Custom Championship there is now an option to make the lobbies closed so only players who were either invited or on your friends list can join.
- Race collisions can now be turned off when creating a custom lobby so you can just race to see who is the fastest with drivers blocking your path to victory!
- In a lobby, you can now specify who you’d like to communicate with via the Voice Channel option. You can choose between; Everyone, Friends or no one.
- There is now an audio option that allows you to set the chat receive volume so that you can balance out the levels with the rest of the game audio.
- Voice Chat can now be turned On or Off so if listening to other people is putting you off your racing you can shut them out completely.
- You now have the option to enable Push to Talk for voice chat, we defaulted this to the Alt key on the keyboard but feel free to bind it to something more suitable if you fancy it.
- The rear view mirror in Rallycross is now correctly placed when using either internal camera so you don’t get a mirror when you look back in dash cam.
- The tooltip to repair a puncture now functions correctly.
- Players who jump start when in the staggered grid position can no longer collide with other users. This should stop those guys who were causing you to jump the start because they rammed you before the green light!
- We’ve put in a fix for the game not saving when you’d entered 6 leagues.
Hopefully those patch notes are a bit less dry than the ones we put out on Monday. We’ve got plenty more fixes to come in the next big update but these will have hopefully fixed the main issues that you guys had with the PvP pack.
Video of the Week
This week’s video comes from the Winner’s Press Conference after the amazing weekend of racing in the FIA World Rallycross Championship in Loheac. Congratulations to Timmy Hansen and Petter Solberg for their podiums and a big thank you to Jean-Baptiste Dubourg for his reference to DiRT in the press conference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S44-ytB25c0
That’s all for this week, have an awesome weekend and Keep it lit!