bad headlights/lightning implementation
The lighting in this game is poor. The headlights are either bugged or poorly implemented. On the screenshot, you can see them dimmed, almost turned off, even though they illuminate the surroundings....
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There's still the fact that the headlights illuminating the road up ahead looks absolutely insane, like moving tv static as well. I do not understand how they think that's even slightly acceptable or normal or accurate to any reality.
The attention to detail and lack of immersion in this game somehow manages to feel worse as it goes on. These things are supposed to improve over time in updates, if not in a small updates then definitely a big one like the 2024 revision. Thanks Unreal Engine? I thought they went with this dead tech because it was easier to develop for, so why is everything like this so much worse than Ego?
Everything about the night lighting and weather needs an overhaul in this game, the effects themselves and especially with how the falling rain and snow interact with headlights. And also their effects on the glass - snow is still totally broken in cockpit view with how it doesn't touch the windshield for 6+ minutes and that's been broken since launch and still nothing has been done about it. That is such small detail that has a huge impact on immersion and realism, and how hard would that actually be to address? Apparently it's 100% impossible since it's been busted for a whole year now.
I really think they do not care about any of this stuff, and I doubt they even read the posts here at this point. It's pretty much pointless to even try and keep bringing these issues up, even though that's where the few people affiliated with Codemasters on the discord tell everyone to keep mentioning any issues. Yelling into a void and all that, but I do appreciate it nonetheless since I can't be bothered much anymore.
Honestly, Codemasters and EA should straight up remove all night driving and all active weather effects from the game completely if they aren't actually going to do anything to improve them.
It's gone from silly to sad and unacceptable to completely frustrating with how they do not care about any of this one bit. There is so much of it I would consider fully broken with how horrible the experience is that I do not comprehend why they are options at all in various modes. I suppose since Time Trials is likely the most popular mode and those setups never run in night or in active weather conditions, they have even less incentive to address the lacking details and broken immersion anywhere else. Can point to that as another example for their lack of interest in improving any of the basics - as popular as TTs are, it still took them a year to address the ugly af default lighting setups there. That was such a minor change, too.
They've gone for the UE engine because it allows them to do longer stages but it looks like they've lost precious knowledge in the process... they clearly don't master the lightning and particles effects. Also no matter which antialiasing settings you choose the game looks blurry as hell.
They said they ported the driving physics from the EGO engine to UE4... my best guess is that they didn't go the UE5 route because this engine uses the Chaos physics engine instead of the PhysX one like UE4. So it was easy to port to UE4. But believe me, porting this to the Chaos engine would require a lot more work and it would be almost easier if they completely rewrite the physics from scratch.
Anyway, it's not like if the current physics were perfect... there is place for much more improvements. The cars turns like if they have an axis on the rear wheels and the suspension and tire simulation could be much more realistic. It still baffles me how much arcade the game feels... they didn't made a lot of improvements since DiRT Rally 1. Assetto Corsa sells well so I don't see why they don't want to improve the simulation side of this game.I played DR1 after years. And my jaw dropped. I can say that EA WRC is a backward game on many levels. Look at this lighting and compare it to what is in EA WRC. The weather effects look incomparable. One thing can be said - abandoning the EGO engine in favor of UE4 was a shot in the foot.
@Chaosphere89 wrote:I played DR1 after years. And my jaw dropped. I can say that EA WRC is a backward game on many levels. Look at this lighting and compare it to what is in EA WRC. The weather effects look incomparable. One thing can be said - abandoning the EGO engine in favor of UE4 was a shot in the foot.
Yep. A 9 year old game still provides far more immersion with the small details. It's wild how much the night driving and weather effects have regressed in basically a decade of time, a decade of hardware and tech and graphical improvements in general, a decade of other driving games doing so much better in these areas than Codemasters is doing today, than Codemasters did themselves so long ago in their own rally game. It's totally baffling.
Most people who've played WRC simply do not care so nothing will change or improve here, and the developers seem to care least of all. Don't think we can blame it all on UE4, though. DR2.0 on EGO was a slight step back in some areas like weather effects, and they've had plenty of time with this engine and these tools up to this point to make the lighting and these details and effects look and behave more naturally in UE4. They just can't be bothered to put the work in to make it happen.The broken / missing snow fx on the windshield is still most egregious lacking element of all this to me, now that most locations can have snowfall with the addition of different seasons. Makes no sense, but whatever... lots of things in this game still make no sense to me.
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