DiRT Rally Road Book – 24/07/15
Welcome to this week’s slightly delayed Road Book which has nothing to do with the fact we (by that I mean me) thought it was Tuesday all day on Wednesday and didn’t realise until it was too late… It’s been a busy week.
First up I feel like we need to clear the air on the mod support issue following the round of news stories this week. We’re not saying no to the inclusion of it and it’s something we’re still actively looking into, adding it in mid early access wouldn’t make sense for the way we are building the game though and if it was to happen it wouldn’t be until towards the end of that period.
When we use the term “mod support” we’re talking about proper Steam Workshop integration, if we were to add it we would want the system to be as easy to use as possible so more people can enjoy it and that seems like the best way.
As for what kind of things we’ll allow you to mod we’re still working that out but we’re not going to be able to do things like let you add in cars we don’t hold a licence for so you can do something crazy like race an LMP1 car up Pikes Peak (as cool as that would be).
The only thing we do have an issue with is the kind of mods that enable you to set faster times. We see those more as cheats and if something gives you an unfair advantage over everybody else then we’re not cool with that – If you’re using anything like that then we won’t allow your times on our leaderboards, you may even find yourself unable to take part in our online events and leagues too.
There are plenty of mods out there for DiRT Rally at the moment: FOV mods, FFB mods, not to mention all the wraps for various cars and you’re all completely welcome to create, share and download things like that. We might not be able to add Steam Workshop support for all of them, but we don’t have a problem with them and we even try out some of the popular ones ourselves.
That’s where we’re at with mod support as of today, not off the cards by any means. We’re just working out what we can do and that goes for the rest of the feedback and feature requests we’ve been getting from you since launch.
I’ll hand you over to DiRT’s Chief Game Designer Paul Coleman for more info on the kind of things to expect in our next update and how we go about deciding what makes the cut.
Kick It With @Kick_Up
Hey everyone, it has been a very busy week as we have been getting all the finishing touches together on the FIA World Rallycross pack. I think most of you guys know pretty much what is coming in that pack in terms of tracks and cars but I wanted to spend a bit of time talking about some of the smaller improvements that we’ve been working on that we will be looking to include in the next couple of updates.
First of all we’ve been looking to fix the stuttering that some of you have been experiencing. I get it a bit on my machine at home so I know firsthand how annoying it can be but we have come up with a solution. Replays are now going to be stored in RAM so they will no longer be claiming 1.9GB of your disc space. This eliminates any stalling that was due to disc activity. After the FIA World Rallycross pack goes live you may want to check C:\ProgramData\Codemasters\DiRT Rally\DataCache\<YOUR USER NAME>\replay folder and delete any files if they are still present.
Something lots of you have been asking for is the ability to remove the driver’s arms and the steering wheel from the cockpit view. We’ve got this working now so you can remove just the arms or remove the arms and wheel from that view. This is going to be in the next update but to add to that we are planning to bring in some greater adjustment to the Field of View in a future update which will allow much greater adjustment of the gameplay cameras.
We’ve also been looking into some of the areas where people have been getting frustrated. We’ve addressed the issue where people found their gearboxes were jumping into neutral. We’ve also added the ability to replace a punctured wheel. Now when you get a puncture you can bring the car to a stop and hold the repair puncture button. This will add a time penalty to your stage time but will mean that you can continue driving the stage without the hindrance.
Another thing that has been frustrating people is the timed reset lines that will reset the car the track if you don’t get back on track after 10 seconds. We’re currently looking at increasing the time you get to recover the vehicle but we are also thinking about letting you turn that timed reset off in your preferences in exchange for a bit of a reward percentage bonus. The hard resets will remain to stop corner cutting and prevent you from hitting spectators but it should allow those of you that relish the struggle of recovering a beached car the opportunity to fight for that victory.
These are just a snippet of some of the cool things that we have planned in. Some of these highly requested features were quite easy to implement and other things like the stutter were a real challenge to track down and fix but it all comes down to the information that you guys are providing us with that enables us to get to the bottom of these issues.
As we move further along the roadmap we will get to a point where we can focus most of our time on refinements and requested features rather than content, disciplines and game modes. I just wanted to say a huge thank you from the team for all of you who have supported us and ask that you continue to tell us what you think about DiRT Rally.
Tweet of the Week
Technically it’s an Instagram (but he did tweet it). It’s FIA World Rallycross driver Timmy Hansen who’s been trying out our latest World RX update just before it goes live.
Screenshots of the Week
These were sent over to us by lasercannonmike on Twitter and will shortly be added to my desktop backgrounds folder! See the full set here.
Video of the Week
We’ve always said there is no such thing as a perfect run but this one by W Mason in the Stratos came really close.
There you have it, another week of DiRT Rally. As always thank you all for being as awesome as you are – we’ll be back next week with more DiRTy Gossip.
Don’t cut. Be brave.
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