Games
DiRT 4 is coming: here’s how to make your own offroad rally stages.
DiRT 4 is heading to consoles and the PC in June this year, and we couldn’t be more excited. Along with usual thrills, spills and fantastic selection of World Rally Cars, Codemasters has now built in a feature that lets you create your very own offroad rally stages, giving you much more variety and letting you design tracks that suit your abilities. We’ve been talking to Paul Coleman, the Chief Game Designer at Codemasters, to find out how it all works.
DiRT 3 and DiRT Rally provided plenty of challenges for rally and racing enthusiasts, but it turns out that DiRT fans wanted even more stages to play with. “We take a huge amount of pride in our environments, and that meant we’d often have to make the compromise in favour of quality over quantity,” explains Coleman. “It was frustrating for our fans and it was frustrating for us, so we sat down and discussed what we could do to keep the quality but increase the quantity. Your Stage was our solution and we are delighted with how it has all worked out.”
“We tried to keep things as immediate as possible for the player,” Coleman tells us. That means you get to choose the location, the length and complexity of the stage, and all you need to do then is slap the ‘Generate’ button. “In the background, our algorithms take the landscape and run a stage through it to those parameters. The generation is near instant and you get to see a map of the stage, so if you don’t like what you see, you can keep hitting generate until you get a stage you like the look of. You can also reverse it.”
Being able to change the length and difficulty of a stage is just the beginning, though, with a whole world of possibilities at your fingertips. “As well as the length and complexity sliders, we also allow players to choose the time of day and weather conditions that the stage is going to be run in,” says Coleman. “We've got more variety than we have ever had before. With our new lighting systems there is a near-infinite combination of possibilities that you can generate.”
The stage generating algorithm is so good that the developers at Codemasters have actually used it themselves when creating tracks for the game, and Coleman adds: “Our Level Design team worked with our Game Designers to curate tracks that have been generated using Your Stage so that they can be used throughout the DiRT 4 career.
“Previously when we picked the tracks to use in our career modes we’ve had to make do with a limited selection. As a result, we ended up having to reuse stages over and over again. With Your Stage we’ve been able to generate hundreds of curated stages but the real beauty is that we can control the difficulty curve and ensure the stages that the player is facing earlier in their career are appropriate to their experience. We can then build up the challenge as they work their way through the championships and get into the faster, more challenging cars.”
Codemasters may have kept things as easy as possible with Your Stage, making it accessible to all by using simple sliders to control variables when generating tracks, but there are plenty of exciting styles of tracks that you can make.
Tone down the complexity
“If you’re the type of player that likes to push things to the limit then you can set a decent length stage and keep the complexity down to a minimum,” Coleman explains. “This means that you’ll get a fast and flowing stage that will test your nerve for a sustained period of time.”
A harder stage is full of testing surprises
“If you want a tight and twisty sprint stage then you can go to the opposite end of the spectrum. The complexity slider affects the elevation and corner severity part of the algorithm and gives different results in each location.”
Different locations mean different conditions
“In Australia you’ll see undulating stages through forests and farms, but in Spain you’ll get heavily cambered asphalt stages that weave in and out of towns under the shadow of some beautiful mountains. It’s really all about generating tracks and finding ones that you love.”
Pick the right length
“We are currently generating stages that can give you around 10-15 minutes of sustained driving depending on what car you are using. Experientially, that is longer than most of our stages in DiRT Rally, but in terms of actual length it is about the same.”
Save to your favourites
“If you generate a track and you like it you can save it to your favourites. From your list of favourites you can then choose the tracks that you want to upload to RaceNet. Your friends and the wider RaceNet community can then download those tracks and use them in their own Freeplay championships and custom multiplayer lobbies.”
Once you’ve created and shared your track, it can also be rated, helping you to discover the best new and exciting tracks. “We have a rating system that lets you rate a stage once you have driven it,” says Coleman. “It’s part of the results hub, so if you love or hate a stage you can upvote or downvote it accordingly. We’ll be looking at which tracks are loved by the community and which ones are… well, not-so-loved, and we’ll be putting the spotlight on the best of the best.
“We’ll also be using it to help us work out what we should do more of as we develop Your Stage further in the future,” he tells us. “It’s all very exciting and this really is just the beginning.”
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