Well, I broke down and bought Dirt Rally 2 GOTY edition just because I was desperate to hop into the Alpine a110 and Lancia Stratos again and haven’t really had those in anything in recent years. Overall it looks good and runs well. BUT, it does NOT seem to be respecting either my PiTool “quality” slider setting or my SteamVR SS setting OR ? It’s the only title I have that’s doing this, so I’m not sure where to look to trouble-shoot things. It also appears to run at the small FOV no matter what I have it actually set to.
Any ideas for me?
Also, let me add once again that I really dislike the minimalist design of these forums. I had no idea where I should really put this thread. Go and look at something like GTPlanet, where it’s incredibly easy to drill down to exactly the topic and sub-topic you want. I realize it’s a trend in forum design currently, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good trend (at least it’s no where near as bad as Ubiquiti’s forums for the enterprise networking solutions. That’s gone so minimalist it’s now almost impossible to find anything whatsoever. I just resort to Google and hope that will find the info I need. Useless.)
I set my Pitool (using 249) for Pt ss 1, Normal ,72 Hz’ No Smart Smooth which is where I run pretty much everything. I launch Steam and SVR then close Pitool. I run my Steam games from Steam.
I then set SVR custom Video settings for DR2. I use Video 70% an no Smooth or legacy re-projection. DR2 then runs at 70fps solid at 72 hz Normal fov.
"SVR will use the Pitool settings I had in place when I last closed PT. " (not sure about bright contrast or offsets. i think PT needs to be open for those)
so I don’t even Pitool again unless I want to set PP for a game like ALYX for example or play an Oculus game.
ymmv
I am looking into setting up a special Subcategory to further improve community based troubleshooting that will also include an option for the Op to mark a Solution solved. If you like PM me and can explore some ideas. There is also a plugin extension that may help on to that end.
Trouble is some want more and some want simplier so hard to keep a good balance. We are slowly ckosing off the Old Categories that are a jumbled mess.
I have no idea what went wrong before, but of course today it’s working just fine! Oh well. Maybe I just hadn’t restarted a sufficient number of times I HAD read that Dirt Rally 2 didn’t require PP, but just like SkyrimVR doesn’t “require” PP, that’s only true if you can overlook some pretty glaring problems with PP off (turn on the headlights and you’ll see what I mean). So unless you are extremely tolerant of “stuff looking wrong” you’ll want to plan on using PP with DR2. Too bad as I was pushing an insane 140% SS at Wide FOV without PP and it was still running great. With PP I’m at 120ish% at Normal FOV, but it still looks good. If you like good SIMS like AC however, be warned, the reports about the FFB in DR2 are spot-on, it’s pretty terrible. I knew way, way more about what my cars were doing on gravel and snow way back in GT4, I’m not kidding, and when did that come out? It’s shocking how many racing/driving simulators manage to get the basics so wrong when they’ve had so long to get things right! Still, it’s nice to have a few of the classic rally cars to climb into and enjoy.
@Heliosurge. I wish I knew what to suggest for a good forum UI. I did web development many, many years back, but haven’t touched it in ages. I’m sure the back-end that OpenMR uses is not something they want to change, so they are probably limited to whatever templates that back-end supports. My advice is to look at other forums that are especially easy to find information on and/or navigate, even if they don’t look all nice and white and airy and flat and low-contrast. A good, fundamental hierarchical structure that’s easy to use is, IHMO, better than something trendy but not as useful.
I play dirt rally 2 a lot, through all weather conditions and times of day. I have never noticed anything odd while running with PP off (aside from a noticeable healthy boost to performance)
There is also quite clearly a forum category for Games and Software.
I found the FFB breaks down if I can’t maintain solid fps which makes sense. If frames start to drop the FFB routines get out of sync with what is going on, on the screen and it doesn’t feel right. Lag ensues.
This is why i don’t use (any) smoothing techniques and accept the settings that allow me to maintain full fps (or close as dam is to swearing) at all times. In doing this, I have absolutely no complaints about the FFB in DR2. Indeed, it is very close to my RL rally car experiences. At least for a computer simulation. Love it.
This thread (like many others that discuss a given game issue) shows just how diverse our expectations are. Much of what people are trying to solve is based on personal expectations.
Most of this goes unrevealed just because the discussions often occur in absence of any meaning common frame of reference. Especially when it comes to perceptions.
Not sure what that subcategory is.
@dogbite Yeah, that’s true for just about everything. For my frame of reference I would again just point to GTPlanet as one of the easiest forums to find things on. Yeah, it’s a pretty dated look, but it has a clear hierarchical structure that displays a reasonable amount of easily navigable info. To me that’s a great design because even if you’ve never been there before you can find your way around quickly and easily.
Goes for racing SIMs too! I’ve been involved in amateur motorsports for a very long time now. Autocross, Ice-X, and endurance karting. So no actual rallying (but plenty of seat time, lots of it on frozen lakes), and 99% of that time is in classic RR cars. I haven’t gotten into tweaking my FFB settings much yet, but I get almost zero sense of what my chassis is doing in Dirt Rally 2. I mean, almost nothing (I’m on a Thrustmaster T500). Some SIMS do this critical thing really well (AC), some do it marginally well, and some don’t seem to do it at all (PCars1). But man, that chassis feel is so critical. I don’t know how the really good sims let you know, just through a steering wheel, that the rear is starting to come around, or the fronts or lightening up, but man, the good ones really nail it and it’s all important. And there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot going on in terms of steering feedback either in DR2 - my steering wheel does not significantly lighten when going light over a crest, for example. Yeah, it lightens a bit, but not in the dramatic way it should. Then again, I keep telling myself to no longer judge unless I have nearly the exact same car IRL, and I don’t. In this case I’m comparing the Alpine A110 against RL classic Porsche 911s and 912s and a poor old VW Beetle. So is it possible that the RR Alpine A110 steering does NOT lighten like my actual RR car’s steering lightens under similar circumstances? Sure, I suppose it’s possible. I’m drawing generalities based on experience with motorsports and a general chassis layout, but zero specific experience with that particular car. But overall I already knew that people that like really great FFB are pretty disappointed in Dirt Rally 2. It still looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun and hopefully once I tweak some FFB settings things will feel better to me.
I totally agree. DR2 is trying to imitate a degree of feedback that is much more complex than just one type of surface and that isn’t doing to ever offer the kind of chassis information one gets IRL.
My point with regards to refresh rate matching fps and no fake duplicate frames was that it that isn’t matched up well, what little info the sim is giving is pooched.
I drove my RL 75 Celica Gt in the same manner as I drive DR2 cars. I actually found that I prefer my old 210 degree Logitech Momo for DR2 rather than my G920 and shifter. Some of that I think is that the FFB routines Codemaster wrote and the Momo have hardly any lag or dead zone, mostly though it’s years of muscle memory.
The other thing too is because I know what to expect of the road from RL my brain fills in the missing info quite well. The key is the physics translate properly and even though I concede there is information missing as long as the car behaves as I expect it to my mind fills in the gaps pretty well and although i can’t actually feel say something like the rear end slip like RL what I see tricks the brain enough to judge it quite well and enjoy the run.
At my age, as the song says “I’m not as good as i once was, but I’m as good once as i always was”
@flynny75 On mine, with headlights on, there are obvious focal plane issues with the headlight beams as they hit trees etc. It’s always possible that if I reduce or change some other eye-candy setting that issue could go away. It’s kind of similar to the issues you see in SkyrimVR without PP - it’s not terrible, it’s just very annoying.
After doing the recommended input file edit and setting all the FFB settings to “0” that were actually doing nothing except deadening the wheel (WTF? Why the hell were those the default out-of-the-box settings? What were they thinking?) It is much better. I very much wish the overall wheel weight wasn’t directly tied to the centering strength (not the fake centering strength at the bottom, the real center strength near the top of the settings) because that means in order the get some of the chassis feel that I want, like being able to easily feel when the rear of my rear-engine car starts to swing out, and some of the effects like the wheel lightening nicely over crests, I have to start with fairly heavy steering. But overall, with the input file setting fix in place and some FFB tweaking it’s about 10X better than it is out of the box!
I HAD read that Dirt Rally 2 didn’t require PP, but just like SkyrimVR doesn’t “require” PP, that’s only true if you can overlook some pretty glaring problems with PP off (turn on the headlights and you’ll see what I mean). So unless you are extremely tolerant of “stuff looking wrong” you’ll want to plan on using PP with DR2. Too bad as I was pushing an insane 140% SS at Wide FOV without PP and it was still running great. With PP I’m at 120ish% at Normal FOV, but it still looks good. If you like good SIMS like AC however, be warned, the reports about the FFB in DR2 are spot-on, it’s pretty terrible. I knew way, way more about what my cars were doing on gravel and snow way back in GT4, I’m not kidding, and when did that come out? It’s shocking how many racing/driving simulators manage to get the basics so wrong when they’ve had so long to get things right! Still, it’s nice to have a few of the classic rally cars to climb into and enjoy.
I do have 2x 50 watt transducers in my chair though. Gives me a good jolt when I land the car.
