DiRT Rally 2.0 DiRT Rally 2.0 - VR Confirmed

Paul Jeffrey · Feb 8, 2019

After considerable encouragement from a vociferous community, Codemasters have finally confirmed VR support will be coming to DiRT Rally 2.0!

Yes, you heard it correctly - following a notable omission of Virtual Reality support in the most recent DiRT 4 rally game from Codemasters, and something of an intense campaign by a portion of the racing game community to make Codemasters understand just how sought after the inclusion of VR support really is for their next game, the English development studio have at long last confirmed that the upcoming DiRT 2.0 will indeed be in receipt of VR compatibility post release - hitting social media earlier today to confirm that a summer VR compatibility update will be made available for the PC version of the game!

Sadly for VR users this isn't all good news however. It appears that the Oculus Rift platform will be VR headset of choice for support within DiRT 2.0, with no mention of the impressive HTC Vive headset, or other compatible brands at this early stage. Now if this means just Oculus support, or if further headsets will be added later, remains open to debate.

Either way, it is wonderful to see how Codemasters have obviously been listening to their community in recent months, and once again hitting the stages in full VR is sure to be an incredibly impressive experience indeed..

I can't wait!

DiRT Rally 2.0 will release February 26th 2019.

If you want to discussion the game with our passionate community, and read about the latest news, check out the RaceDepartment DiRT Rally 2.0 Sub Forum for a great place to pick up mods, catch the latest news and chat about the game with our community. Give it a go, just keep it DiRTy!

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ears · Feb 11, 2019

Andrew_WOT said:
Why do you keep calling official support for Rift and other HMDs in OpenVR a "hack".
OpenVR 101.

Because it's not direct. It's another layer, just like Revive.

From the page you linked.

As a developer, we haven’t control over the runtime in which our application will execute (i.e.: we can’t use OpenVR and choose to execute directly in Oculus runtime); that will be dictated by the API/SDK we are using instead. For example, if we are executing our application in an Oculus Rift headset and we developed it using OpenVR, at runtime the execution workflow will be OpenVR API > SteamVR runtime > Oculus API > Oculus runtime > Oculus drivers > Oculus HMD, in contrast to what would happen if we develop with the Oculus API, in which case at runtime the application’s workflow will be more direct, Oculus API > Oculus runtime > Oculus drivers > Oculus HMD.

ears · Feb 11, 2019

Andrew_WOT said:
It's open SDK/platform, when Oculus on the other hand is completely closed except barely working revive community effort.

Is SteamVR open source?

Deleted member 197115 · Feb 11, 2019

Layer of indirection is how all standard APIs work, USB, DirectX, etc. Nobody talks directly to the hardware drivers these days.
This is standard way to bring everyone to a common denominator. Why do you see it as a hack?

Revive is a community project, and from my experience with it is far from finished/polished product, which is expected.
OpenVR on the other hand works brilliantly with WMR headsets.

ears · Feb 11, 2019

Really good that it works well with WMR headsets.

But SteamVR doesn't support the Rift particularly well. I've compared performance using games that support both SteamVR and Oculus SDK and the performance difference is noticeable.

As the article you linked to stated, there are more layers.

So please don't assume that SteamVR, OpenVR offer the same experience to Rift users as they do to SteamVR native users, because they don't.

Deleted member 197115 · Feb 11, 2019

Vive and WMR are communicating through OpenVR API layer, there is no native Vive calls from game engine. That translated to specific HMD HW calls in OpenVR driver.
Yes, there is layer of indirection, how much overheads it adds depends on specific vendor driver implementation. May be Oculus is not that interested in making it efficient enough.

And as I mentioned earlier at some point AC had performance advantage in OpenVR over direct Oculus SDK, not sure if situation changed.
https://www.assettocorsa.net/forum/index.php?threads/vr-performance-in-oculus-vs-ovr-modes.47367/

aklru · Feb 12, 2019

ears said:
Only to the Vive - and my opinion was the display on the Rift was much clearer and sharper, with noticeably less SDE. I haven't tried any WMDs or the Vive Pro.

What HMD do you have?

And as for the actual point of your post... I don't want exclusives to be there. VR is in such a weak position anyway (cockpit based games are only real genre where VR is consistently supported in major non-VR titles) that a single SDK would likely lead to more interest from potential developers.

But we're not there.

We have SteamVR that has nothing more really than, similar to your assessment of Revive, a suboptimal but highly appreciated compatibility hack for the Rift. SteamVR doesn't have native Rift support and Oculus store doesn't have native Vive support. Steam sells games that are not available on Oculus, so Rift owners have to suffer the Steam wrapper hack to play them.

Oculus compatibility in SteamVR is a hack, a wrapper, just like Revive. It's not native support.

Oculus might like to sell more games to more people so they might like native Vive support in their SDK.
Steam might like to keep selling lots of games to lots of people so they'd prefer it if Oculus didn't have native support for the Vive in their SDK.
Steam might like to sell more games to Oculus owners so might like native Oculus support in their SDK.
Oculus might like to keep as many customers as possible so might not want Steam to have native Rift support in their SDK.

Only heresay, but in a capitalist, commercial, profit and dividend driven world, to assume that any organisation is looking out for the user, consumer, person, is usually a mistake.

As with most other platforms, Valve and Facebook are commercial competitors, and it's the consumers who will continue to lose out until either one of them, or a newcomer, achieves some kind of dominance.

I had a Vive Pro, but chose to refund because it was DOA.
The few hours I got it to function, showed a leap in quality, but also how poorly VR adapted to an old proprietary HMD looks in a newer one.
Currently waiting to see if/when my Pimax preorder comes through.

As others have pointed out, poor performance with OpenVR on the Rift is because of Oculus' implementation.
They choose to not optimize how their product works with an open standard.

But I agree with you that the walled garden that is Steam, is not necessarily better.
I don't know what's in the works, but VR needs a completely open framework.
Currently that's not available for the vast majority of apps, as you have to bend over to either Facebook or Valve to run them.
But at least, SteamVR implements an open API and is available for anyone to utilize.