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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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.
Have you tried increasing HDR brightness in settings? Makes a noticeable difference
It is a good temporary solution, I did it, but as they say above this game has serious lighting problems.
