DiRT Rally DiRT Rally Flying Finland Update Released

Ole Marius Myrvold

JWB 96-13
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Ford_Finland_Jump_1_A.jpg

After a long wait, Codemasters have released the new update for DiRT Rally today, containing two new cars, 12 stages in Finland and lots of new and enhanced features.


Not too far off a full release, DiRT Rally has been updated to v0.8, with the 2001 Subaru Impreza WRC, and 2001 Ford Focus WRC included, the cars represents the two most recent British world champions, from a year they both fought hard for the world title.

The new stuff includes
  • A new, reworked handling model is also included for the 60's, 70's, 80's RWD and 2010-classes, with a major engine and downforce re-work, to make the cars more dynamic.
  • Custom Championships, to tweak the number of stages, AI difficulty and number of events, to set up a championship that suits you and the time you have to play
  • New engine sound for the 1995 Subaru Impreza
  • Mouse Support!
  • Invite Friend option for PvP events.
And here is the changelog!
  • 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.
 
IMO, I do think they've gone overboard with something regarding the cars flight patterns.
Or alternatively, we get away with total and complete chassis annihilation.

Probably both.

Driving the old Escort on some of the Finnish stages was good for a laugh - that car flies. It could legitimately become a certified aircraft as much time as the thing spends in the air. We're not talking about bumps, we're talking about flying over a house. Repeatedly.

Rally cars are tough as nails no doubt, but the way the whole car slams into the ground repeatedly from such a height is just whack. The car would need to be made of unobatanium to survive. :O_o:
 
IMO, I do think they've gone overboard with something regarding the cars flight patterns.
Or alternatively, we get away with total and complete chassis annihilation.

Probably both.

Driving the old Escort on some of the Finnish stages was good for a laugh - that car flies. It could legitimately become a certified aircraft as much time as the thing spends in the air. We're not talking about bumps, we're talking about flying over a house. Repeatedly.

Rally cars are tough as nails no doubt, but the way the whole car slams into the ground repeatedly from such a height is just whack. The car would need to be made of unobatanium to survive. :O_o:

European/Japan cars can handle much more than American cars apparently ;)
 
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Did the daily event with the New Focus in Wales and it was so driveable! It made sense, it felt the way I would expect it to feel. I love using the compression after a jump to help change directions. Very immersive. For some reason, I was driving better last night than I ever had. I was handling the slow corners and using the handbrake better than I have been. I felt like I was really hustling the car around.

This sim just keeps getting better. Not quite polished enough, but super solid. I don't regret buying this when I did the week of release. Give me another month and I'll have more hours in this than AC... (I only get 2-3 hours per week to race...)
 
Alright. Clocked more miles today on different courses there, I agree that the amount of time while airborne is considerable in these Finnish stages.
However, I yet to find any evidence that it's different from real life... And even if it is, the culprit here most likely is the stages' slightly exaggerated profile. Well, I don't think anybody's going to laser-scan the entire Ouninpohja any time soon, so we have to deal with what we have until then.
Not to mention that the real Ouninpohja still has enough jumpy sections nonetheless.

Had a few weird cases of the engine stalling after a particularly harsh landing though... My clutch pedal curve is set to be very progressive, by the way.

Rally cars are tough as nails no doubt, but the way the whole car slams into the ground repeatedly from such a height is just whack. The car would need to be made of unobatanium to survive. :O_o:
While I agree that the damage modelling here is really lacking at the moment, the amount of beating the real rally cars can get away with is staggering.
Quite a lot of slamming into the ground there also, isn't it? After all, rally-prepped suspensions are a force to be reckoned with. There are also MX-bikes that jump much higher/further than that... No unobtanium there either. Just enough ground clearance, suspension travel and some advanced shocks and springs to match.

tarmac physics are simply awful.. turned it off in 5mins. and uninstalled. Ill wait to they release it fully..
If you want tarmac physics, there is enough dedicated simulations for that... And this tarmac physics is no longer awful anymore, more like "interesting" and "promising" after this patch. Also, RBR tarmac physics is off as well. But true rallying is mostly about driving on gravel, you know.

After a few hours driving !

0.8 is definitely a step in the right direction !
Indeed :) Also, good to see them back to the rallying itself. That rally-cross thing doesn't make much sense without really good tarmac physics... And it's elusive enough so that even ISI hasn't quite nailed it yet.
 
Did the daily event with the New Focus in Wales and it was so driveable! It made sense, it felt the way I would expect it to feel. I love using the compression after a jump to help change directions. Very immersive. For some reason, I was driving better last night than I ever had. I was handling the slow corners and using the handbrake better than I have been. I felt like I was really hustling the car around.

This sim just keeps getting better. Not quite polished enough, but super solid. I don't regret buying this when I did the week of release. Give me another month and I'll have more hours in this than AC... (I only get 2-3 hours per week to race...)

This^^^^^^
Is exactly how I feel with it at the moment. :thumbsup:
2015-06-20_00025_zpszj9tcvqv.jpg
 
Alright. Clocked more miles today on different courses there, I agree that the amount of time while airborne is considerable in these Finnish stages.
However, I yet to find any evidence that it's different from real life... And even if it is, the culprit here most likely is the stages' slightly exaggerated profile. Well, I don't think anybody's going to laser-scan the entire Ouninpohja any time soon, so we have to deal with what we have until then.
Not to mention that the real Ouninpohja still has enough jumpy sections nonetheless.
You know, if you like how the new physics behave as far as jumps go and whatnot, that's one thing. But to sit there and say you can't tell whether the cars are airborne or not in those two onboards I posted and you can't see any difference between what's happening in game and those videos is quite another. You either haven't driven Kontinjarv or your powers of observation are suspect.

First video: 2:42-3:56
Second video: 3:12-4:26

Now go drive Kontinjarv flatout from the "3 right" at the junction to the "2 left".
If you want tarmac physics, there is enough dedicated simulations for that... And this tarmac physics is no longer awful anymore, more like "interesting" and "promising" after this patch. Also, RBR tarmac physics is off as well. But true rallying is mostly about driving on gravel, you know.
And I'm not sure why you keep bringing up RBR when I don't think it's been mentioned in this thread at all.
 
Regarding the flight thing - seems kind of dependent on the car. The old Escort would smash itself to bits and every little crest becomes a JATO unit under the car while the 2000s Focus for example actually behaves in a believable fashion.

European/Japan cars can handle much more than American cars apparently ;)

That's funny - because there are no American cars in this game.

The closest you get are the Fiesta and Focus, which were part of Ford's recentering (or whatever you want to call it) between Ford in the US and Ford Europe to sell one car worldwide rather than two totally different lineups.
 
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Overall all cars feel alot more agile and you can power rgrough hairpins in a great way. Gravel feels fantastic imo.

The tarmac is very very strange. While I think the grip is more progressive now, the FFB feel has taken a hit. The Impreza 2001 feels sluggish. When straightening the wheel after a corner you sloooooowly feel the weight shift and it feels like a boat rocking from side to side.
We are also quite a few people that get the feeling there is a center pivot in play. The back end of the car isn't lining up with the front all the time. Now and then I get the "crab" feeling. This is most noticeable in the 2001 cars.
 
You know, if you like how the new physics behave as far as jumps go and whatnot, that's one thing. But to sit there and say you can't tell whether the cars are airborne or not in those two onboards I posted and you can't see any difference between what's happening in game and those videos is quite another. You either haven't driven Kontinjarv or your powers of observation are suspect.

First video: 2:42-3:56
Second video: 3:12-4:26

Now go drive Kontinjarv flatout from the "3 right" at the junction to the "2 left".
Now go set your car up on the very soft side, watch the replay from the fixed cam inside the cockpit and turn the volume down. You are bound to end up feeling that the amount of "flying around" is reduced, thanks to the cam being rigidly attached to the car's body and the suspension doing its best to smooth out most of the lesser landings.
If you pay more attention to the second clip you provided, you'll also notice that the car does get some air after leaving almost every crest it encounters.

That said, looks like Codies decided to make the Finnish stages more hardcore than they really are by making the road out of inner parts of concatenated arcs, whereas the real Ouninpohja looks more of a "flat follows the ramp" type. Also, not sure if gravel in Dirt Rally provides enough vertical dampening... And while traversing such acute crests the front tires are bound to cut through them a little, since it's gravel we are talking about here and the car still weighs a lot, thus rendering the launch tangent less steeper. While in Dirt Rally gravel feels solid more often than not, at least when it comes to the vertical forces.

And I'm not sure why you keep bringing up RBR when I don't think it's been mentioned in this thread at all.
Because it's the only other choice. Apart from doing it in real life, of course...

We are also quite a few people that get the feeling there is a center pivot in play.
Maybe the reason for that is the hope of seeing it there? So that it would be easier to say, "it's been over 10 years, but nobody can come up with a decent rally sim yet."
Seriously, when looking at WRC 5 and SLRE preview videos, it's too easy to spot the center pivoting happening. But in DR? Really doubt that. Haven't noticed it myself, at least.
 
Whatever anybody thinks, this Rallye sim has become superb. Very very enjoyable now. Just the external track camera's to sort out and job done.:thumbsup:
 
plus seat adjustment, steering visual rotation, tarmac physics...
Yes to seat adjustment, Tarmac physics a little and replay saving, but steering wheel rotation? No thanks. I use a wheel (t500rs) to drive this sim, why would I want another virtual wheel in front of me? That would be silly.
 

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