Latest Road Block
DiRT Rally Road Book - 11/09/15
Original post here
https://www.dirtgame.com/uk/blog/5012
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.