Dirt 4 - More dirty cars and challenges

So far, all I did was DiRT academy’s Driving techniques and Advanced Driving techniques. I had to go to bed after that, so I quit out. I hope I can get back to that DiRT academy in the same place again. When I tried to go back in, I have to choose a car type and stuff, so I’m worried that I’ve lost my one chance to have that simple training at the start before they throw you into the main menu.

I am loving the DiRT academy though. A little handholding, showing you how to do things, and actually explaining how to drive. It’s good stuff.

Sounds like the one from Richard Burns.

The correct way to approach Control.

Oh my god, why am I stuck at work at all day when I could be at home playing DiRT4? Whhhhhhhhyyyyy?

It’s my birthday tomorrow. I’m going to treat myself by playing DiRT 4 tomorrow night until I’m too sleepy to drive straight in the game.

I love that guy at the end of the clip, sarcastically clapping at you.

I love that final tink sound like I knocked over the control guy’s coffee cup.

It’s getting some hateraid on Steam, but honestly I think the game is f’n fantastic and people are just mad it’s not Dirt Rally 2. The driving is fun, there’s tons to do and the custom events will make online play a blast. Sure sometimes it generates a boring track, but sometimes you get some pretty fantastic stuff. I give it a major thumbs up.

Pro Tip… You can switch the co-pilot to a guy if you want. It took me 4 hours before I realized that.

Most importantly, if you’re a screenshot whore like me, you can turn the “DiRT 4” watermark off from the menu. That was the tipping point for me. Once I saw that I moved the game from 7/10 to 9/10.

More seriously, the game absolutely hates AMD’s ReLive game recorder, but only the replay mode. I have ReLive set up so it spools to a fourth drive that only contains gameplay videos, but DiRT4 don’t care - if I have the replay function going then the game is extremely choppy even on the ultra low settings.

However, if I turn replay off the game’s fine even if I’m actually recording live. Makes no sense, but there’s PC gaming for you.

I thought the Dirt Acadmey thing was going to be stupid, but after hooning around in a Subaru in free mode I’ve changed my mind. Something about rounding a tyre bundle at 90mph, hammering into a hanger and hearing the engine note echo back off the metal walls, then handbrake turning to fly out backwards, yanking the wheel over, dropping into first gear and smoking the tyres off toward the trees is tremendous fun.

Lady Bismarck came to see if I was ok because I didn’t realise how loud I was laughing with the headphones on.

Early experimentation with the create-a-stage thing is fun. I’ve created a bunch of interesting stages if not any actual diamonds yet. At speed I’ve spent exactly none seconds thinking “this stage is clearly machine created” and the dynamic pace notes are well done, although the lady and I disagree about some of her “5” calls that are clearly closer to 4s.

As far as performance goes, it looks like the game never asked me for any input on the settings, but automatically set itself to my monitor’s resolution (1920x1080) and put itself on high settings, set at 59 fps, V-Sync Off. Now, in DiRT Rally, that was a problem in some areas, where I really needed V-sync. We shall see. I’ll trust their automatic settings for now. High looks really nice, and so far in DiRT Academy, the game plays really smooth, so the frame rate is staying high and there’s no tearing.

Once again my first generation i5-750 from 2009 is up to the task. Huzzah! This thing turned out to be a workhorse.

This gets a like from me.

Also, those Core i5/i7’s from 2009 are awesome. I finally bought a new PC back in December, but I moved the i7-860 upstairs and with a GTX970 at 1080p, it’s just as pretty as the one downstairs even though that’s an i7-6700 with a GTX1070. I do have GSync downstairs on a 2560x1440 panel, and yeah, that rocks out, but I still can play on the old machine and performance is excellent.

Every single time I scroll by this thread I momentarily wonder why the fuck someone made a whole thread about a purveyor of alarming looking/smelling/tasting canned meat products.

You bastards made me break down on this. I had $5 in Humble credit from The Witness being the lead game in the Monthly awhile back (I think) and I got the double 10% discounts. $43 later I should be playing this weekend. If you don’t have me friended on Steam, it’s DaveLong.

The dynamic stuff on the tracks has me totally intrigued… Looking forward to it this weekend!

Finally got home and I can play DiRT 4!!!

No wait. Steam says I have to download an update first. There’s nothing in the news section on what’s in this update. And it’s taking forever to pre-allocate for this update. Sigh****.

So what are you guys up to? I’m sitting here, waiting for pre-allocation on this stupid update. Come on Steam! Let me play DiRT already!

Same thing for me - Steam has downloaded 576mb of a 583mb patch and will not download the rest. Game won’t launch until it does.

Literally the second I hit send the box popped up to say it had finished downloading. So that worked.

Those last 7mb took about 20 minutes.

Yep, mine has been stuck at 576mb for a while too.

Good to know I only have to wait <20 more minutes, looking at the bright side. I think it’s actually applying the update at this stage (576mb) because there’s a lot of HD usage. I’m bet they’re updating a lot of small files, which is why it’s taking so long. File I/O always has a huge time overhead, so the more files to update, the longer it takes.

Someone claims it’s a change to steering weight and damping and that the FFB feels better now.

Take with usual internet pinch of salt.

Career mode so far has been a blast. I did a couple of races on a loaned car. And then I bought a used Opel and started my own team. And I raced my first stage under that team. On the second stage, as the camera circled around my car at the start, my Welsh co-driver warned me that there was a crash on the stage, and to be careful.

And that’s when the game hung. A hard crash. No keyboard input, nothing. I had to reset my computer. So that’s what he meant by a crash on the course. I had thought he was talking about the stage I was on, not the game.

That was the end of my career game, sadly. If I try to continue my career, it loads that map again, and it always hard-crashes my computer.

I should have bought this on Xbox. :(

I’ve had a fairly positive reaction to the game. It definitely has a DiRT Rally ‘feel’ to it, but it’s also…different.

The greater lateral grip (relative to DR) noted by a number of youtubers who received the game early is certainly present and demands that you really throw the car into corners if you want to break the back end loose. I have no real world experience to judge whether this is more or less realistic than DR, but I will say it’s marginally less fun.

This was problematic on the FWD cars in the first few career events, but was less of an issue once I progressed to the AWD Impreza. While I still get serious understeer at low speeds it isn’t a game breaker as the trees tend to be approaching at a far less rapid rate in those situations…

The track generation is generally very good, producing realistic roadways even if they are fairly bland in comparison to DRs handcrafted stages. I am starting to notice some of the ‘blocks’ repeating in different events which does break the illusion somewhat, but I’m willing to overlook that if it means we’re getting a tool that’ll do away with the rote memorisation that ultimately resulted in me putting DR to one side (albeit after 100 hours of play and a place in the top five of my all time favourite games).

Has anyone else noticed that the AI stage times aren’t super competitive? I’ve been steadily increasing the difficulty as I progress through the career but even at Challenging (or whatever the second from top one is called) it’s not particularly surprising to top the leaderboard even with a spin during the stage. Certainly that would never have happened in DR from what I remember.

I’ve discovered that uninstalling the game, re-installing it, and deleting my old save game doesn’t help much. The game still crashes after a little bit of play. However, there seems to be a few second window between the crash and my whole computer crashing, so if I press Alt-Tab in that little window, I can get to the desktop and it crashes DiRT 4 only, and my system is spared.

And as it crashes, it sends a bug report to DiRT 4 headquarters. Hopefully someone over there is on top of this.

Meanwhile, downloading the latest recommended AMD drivers didn’t help.