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Personally, I love the locomotion. All I really have trouble with is the occasional climbing glitch and relative difficulty getting up steep hills. Otherwise it all works pretty well and only a little wiggling is needed to extricate yourself.
On the other hand, I have a pretty fast system, and while the characters all move fairly quickly, treading lightly on the ground, I played it on a slower system and the locomotion was somehow worse. Holding a direction, as I would on my system, the robot somehow struggled, his feet sinking to his knee in the sand. Chances are most of these people with lots of trouble in moving around have the same problem. If their system was faster, it might not be a problem. As it is, there's probably some perfomance glitch, since the characters don't just move slower, but sink deeper.

For now liberal use of the concrete gun solves most movement problems, and DIRTmaster said he would fix the movement stuff (maybe) next build. Sinking into the ground makes it sort of realistic, after all, its a big problem in real wars

I'm very impressed with this build of DIRT - it feels incredibly promising. Definitely something I'll be keeping an eye on. If I've got five or ten minutes to kill, I usually boot it up and see what kind of craziness I can accomplish. So far one of my favourite things to do is hit an empty rocket with one of the blasters so that the force of the 'damage jets' forces it to burrow into the ground, and then follow it into a really deep cave. I crashed the game the other day by doing that.

The weapons feel nice, and the strategy element (gathering gold and etc.) is a wonderful addition. I love it. Keep up the fantastic work.

Thanks guys, very much appreciate the input.

Teeth: Yes, the next build will have jetpacks which will be activated with the jump button while in the air. So the first hit to the jump button will jsut make the guy jump, and a second press while in the air will fire the jets. They will be limited to short jumps, however, and their effect will depend on how much gear+gold you're carrying (ie how heavy your guy currently is). With a normal load a jetpack blast will only enable you to comfortably jump over an upright rocket, for example.
I hear what you're saying about the jetpacks being somewhat of a cop-out solution, though. However, in the limited form described above, it solves a lot of nagging problems (like getting to the other side of a rocket) without destroying the fun in the gameplay, and actually adding some dynamics to it (like the tradoff of lugging a lot of gear vs mobility).

It's been a serious challenge to enable humanoid actors to traverse completely arbitrary terrain, but I think the solution I've got going is the right track; it just needs a lot more tweaking and improvement to be completely intuitive to the player.

Vib: Yeah, there is an inconsistency in the framerate and how the locomotion physics works... lower framerate will make you sink faster. I'll look into this too.

Jetpacks sounds sweet and all but..
Does locomotion really have to be so dependant on physics?
Can't the character just sortof.. move with the ground, like they seem to do in most games like this?

I really don't know enough about how the game works to know if it's possible but it would be even more fun if we could walk like normal people/robots

well, think about it.. how would you solve it otherwise?

Really, the only other option I can think of is to 'artifically' put the player a certain distance above a single terrain pixel (or average of several pixels) he's standing on. That works well for tile-based games (super mario bros, etc), where the tiles are large, or in Liero and Worms, where the character is small or and bloblike. DIRT has both small atomic map units ('tiles' as small as pixels on the screen), and larger actors. It wouldn't look very convincing under these circumstances.

Also, how would locomotion work across completely irregular terrain using this method?

Fun challaneges indeed. I'll try to put out the jetpack build during the weekend here.

Give the actors bigger feet O_O

My main issue is that charecters cant climb, except the robot...
But its kinda realisitic, they sort of sink into the ground whenever they take a step, though this can cause sticking problems.

that's a tweaking problem, and not inherent in the method itself ;0

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In order to change the direction the jet pack makes you jump, you have to aim the head! if the head is up, you will go up. if its level with the terain, you will go forewards with a jump. down..... i dont want to talk about.