One of the best driving games in recent years, Dirt Rally from Codemasters, will soon patch their virtual reality support to work on the recently release Oculus Rift consumer edition.
Dirt Rally is, in this writer’s opinion, the finest Rally game of a generation and one of the best racing games on release right now. So, when Codemasters announced that their then Early Access title was to arrive with support for the Oculus Rift I was overjoyed. However, when it appeared, VR functionality (as was the case with many titles not developed for VR) was rudimentary at best, broken at worst as tested with the DK2 at least.
Now, Codemasters have announced that the next patch release will bring with it enhanced support for Oculus’ 1.3 SDK, which means that those who have received their Oculus Rift consumer edition headsets should be able to enjoy immersive rallying at long last. whether the patch will also address the general user experience issues which plagued the previous VR iterations (i.e. non VR menus) or not is as yet unknown, but at the very least the visual aspect once you’re in-game should be much improved.
HTC Vive owners will have to wait however, as no SteamVR support seems to be on the cards just yet.
No word just yet as to when we can expect the new patch, but it sounds to be imminent. Here are the initial planned updates / fixed for the next release for reference. Keep an eye on this thread for more information as it appears.
- Motion blur being applied to cars in bonnet camera and in replays (PC only)
- Excessive knocking effect on steering wheels when playing rallycross
- Added Oculus 1.3 support which will re-enable Oculus gameplay (PC only)
- AI for Classic and S1600 Rallycross adjusted to have more variety
- Leaderboards will no longer be blank and the difference column works
- Fixes for rain effects displaying incorrectly on some AMD cards (PC only)
- Rain causing bad reflections on some windscreens
In the mean time, I recently took Project Cars for a spin, which was an Oculus Rift consumer edition launch title, and the VR support – although not perfect – works very well indeed. We’ll be taking a closer look at the game in the future. Sadly, the future of VR support for another title which received is early on, namely Assetto Corsa, looks to have lowered their development focus on that feature, albeit it’s still in the road map.