ApexAzimuth

Finished Poland, and I definitely can't complain about my results. I had decent confidence and didn't have any drama until stage 6 though I think I could have gone alot faster if Poland didn't scare the heck out of me. I got a bit tail happy on SS6 and nearly had an intimate encounter with a tree at 200kph. After that near-retirement, my confidence dropped and I made a few more mistakes. SS7 wasn't as fast as I would have liked after still being a bit shaken.

Speaking as someone who does road design professionally, I can assure you that tape measurements are not even close to enough to getting that kind of accuracy. I'm positive some kind of laser measurement was used to build these stages that close to real life. Whether it's an aerial scan, a ground scan, or a topographic survey, it was not done with photos and tape measurements. Also should mention that the time it would take to get that many measurements manually would make this option less accurate and more expensive than doing a laser scan that takes a fraction of the time. -Pay 5 people for hundreds of hours to measure manually and get inaccurate and erroneous data with a tape measure, or -Pay a survey crew of 2 or 3 with some expensive equipment for a dozen or so hours to get measurements that are hundreds of times more accurate. The choice is pretty easy.

I'm pretty sure these stages are laser scanned. There are variations, but the majority of the topography is 1:1. It's exceptionally difficult to model a location that closely to real life without impeccable measurements, and using a point cloud from a scanner is the most efficient way to do that.

Looks like I was utterly smoked by my fellow countryman @jnco89 in Argentina. That's some mad speed, sir!

It really wasn't easy keeping up with you in Argentina, @UnderclassGDfan! I had a couple warm-up mistakes in SS1 and SS2. Nerves got to me a bit when I saw how much I'd have to push to keep up with both @UnderclassGDfan and @Janneman60. Very quick runs, gents. I felt like I was on the bleeding edge of my limits here. Historically, Argentina is where I get a retirement, so being on my limits was particularly scary. Thankfully I kept the rubber side down and managed to keep a fast and consistent pace.

Speaking for myself here. I wouldn't say that I have the stages memorized, but after running them several times over the course of many months, I remember aspects of specific corners that have red flags in my memory. There are portions of stages that I have memorized to be sure, but without stage notes I would be several minutes slower. Red flags in my memory, corners that I have memorized are: #1. Corners that have caused me to go off or crash more than once. If I had a real codriver, I'd have these corners flagged as double or triple caution in our pace notes. #2. Corners that look innocent at first glance and by pacenotes, but are actually terribly treacherous. Think "Six right long, tightens 5", but the 5 is really a 3... #3. Corners that seem dangerous or difficult at first glance, but aren't. There are several 1's and 2's that really should be 3's or 4's. I remember these so I can keep my speed through them. #4. Big, safe cuts through tight corners. There are several squares and 1's that have huge, safe cuts. I try to remember these so I can save some time. I'd say I only "memorize" about 10% of the corners through the stages, but I'm familiar with nearly all of them, just through repetition.

The roads on the New England, USA stages were discovered to actually be located near the North Snoqualmie River, Washington. (see Martin Fiala's excellent research here: https://www.racedepartment.com/threads/dirt-rally-2-stages-in-real-life.167966/). As a resident of Washington, fairly familiar with the area, and having taken several motorcycle rides through this region, I always thought these stages looked suspiciously familiar, even before finding Martin's research. Why was this location named "New England" when it's definitely Washington? Even the names of the stages match the names of the roads in Washington e.g. Fury Lake Road, North Fork [Snoqualmie River] Pass. It's almost as if it was decided later in development to rename the location to New England, or it was some kind of mistake. Discuss.

I had a pretty good run in Washington New England last night. I had a scare on SS1 on one of the long 3R Junction turns, clipping my rear on a rock or tree, giving me a short spin, so nerves slowed me down a bit on SS2. The rest of the stages went as well as I could hope for. We'll see what the other speedsters have in store!

The adrenaline in my system right now is probably unsafe... Stages 1-5 I managed to be only a few seconds behind @MongoJon [VR] and @jnco89, gaining some and losing some stage to stage, and I felt good about my chances up until stage 6 about halfway into Hamra. I slid just a tad off the line and suddenly I came to a total deadstop and my car was RUINED. Front end completely smashed in, steam pouring out of the radiator, and Phil saying the engine's really in trouble (I've never even heard him say that before). I have no idea what I hit, but it was definitely buried in the snow and invisible, but on top of this, I was high-centered on the thing, so I couldn't get off of it and had to recover. The rest of the stage was panic mode but somehow I managed to keep my pace, despite a noticeable drop in power. The poor bimmer wasn't able to push in 6th gear more than about halfway through the gear. By about the last 20 seconds, the engine started giving out completely and I was worried I might get a terminal damage from engine seizing (can that even happen?). Despite all this I was apparently only about ~15 seconds off of @jnco89's total time. On Service, the car was an absolute wreck. I've never seen damage this bad in all my time in DR2.0. Heavy damage everywhere. I managed to balance quick fixes and opt not to repair some parts, only having 3 seconds left on service, but most of the car repaired. On SS7 I must have been possessed by adrenaline because I went faster than I've ever gone in Sweden. Frankly some of those corners looked like I had a death wish in the replay, so I guess I made up for that time and ended up ahead. I really didn't expect to come out ahead on this one after SS6 and you guys' blistering pace on these stages. I'm gonna lay down and have a heart attack now...

Many of these cars are very frustrating to drive in VR because of the HDR overexposure issue. In the Megane RX, even on 0 brightness, everything outside of the car is whiteout because of the HDR adaptation not working properly. To be clear, this problem affects every aspect of gameplay in VR, but it's particularly egregious with RX cars because of their low visibility.

I'm using a Vive. Depending on the car, sometimes the overexposure is insane. In many of the RX cars, even on max low brightness, everything outside the vehicle is barely visible with how overexposed it is.

With Sweden coming up and the blinding whiteout being bad even in 2D, do any of you VR players know a solution or workaround for the broken HDR in VR? Even with brightness all the way down, the sky is just flat white, and snow is the same. Switching to a bonnet cam helps, but I can’t really deal with feeling like a disembodied head welded to the hood...

Welcome! Last championship here was my first club as well, and I'm really glad I did it; Lots of great people here! I think you'll enjoy it 😄 What worked for me is just driving many different types of cars and getting to where you're at least competitive with them. Sometimes after driving a RWD car for a week, I go back to 4WD and find that I'm several seconds faster than my best without even trying.

If all you want is an impression of a location, then doing the above would be fine, but that's not the standard that DR2.0's tracks adhere to. They are nearly accurate models of real locations. As someone that works in road design IRL, I can tell you that google street view and publicly available topographic data are not going to cut it. Sure, you could get a good impression of a rally location and creatively interpret what you see, and I'm sure you could make good rally stages that way, but there's a specific quality that's lost when you do this to be sure. I'm not saying it's an invalid way to approach stage design; just that it's not the way Dirt Rally's stages are done.

I'm sure developing new rally stages is more laborious than most people know. So far all of Dirt Rally 2.0's rally stages are 1:1 representations of real world roads/trails. They have to visit the location with laser scanning equipment (not cheap), scan the location, filter the data so it's a usable point cloud for level designers to meticulously model the environment. Once it's modeled they're not even halfway done, because they need to drive the stages over and over again in order to identify the most commonly traveled paths, not only for visual appearance, but also for track degradation models. Extensive stage testing needs to continue with drivers of various skill levels in all vehicle classes under all conditions to get a pace for AI times so that they feel realistic. All throughout this process they have to get testers to try and break the level at every point so they can find holes in the 'design' that are too easy to exploit, or areas that cause other problems. All that said, I think it's time well spent because DR2.0's stages are immaculate. I'd happily pay for more stages so they can continue to make them. (But seriously Codies, if you do. Please give us more car setup slots 😭)