Night fell on the highway. The parts you win are now worth something. And the whole thing got faster. This is not a patch. It is the version of Traffic Rivals we should have shipped in the first place — rebuilt from the headlights up, with an economy that runs on Valve's servers and a framerate that finally holds. The short version: you race, you win parts, and those parts are real Steam items. Sell them on the Steam Community Market and the value lands in your Steam Wallet. Time in this game is worth something now.
NIGHT RACING IS HERE
Every race now rolls its own sky. Full daylight, late afternoon, golden-hour sunset, or dead of night under a single moon — you find out on the grid, and your opponent races under exactly the same sky. Nobody gets the easy light. Night is not a colour filter. It is a different race:
Headlights that actually light the road. Rebuilt from scratch with real beam patterns. Low beam lays down an even sheet of light out to 40 metres instead of a blown-out puddle at your bumper. High beam reaches deep into the dark.
Flash your high beams without your low beams cutting out.
Traffic has headlights now. The cars ahead of you are lit, braking in red, and they no longer vanish into nothing right in front of the camera.
Tail and brake lights rebalanced so they read in daylight without painting the bodywork red at night.
If you have only ever raced this game in the afternoon, you have not raced it.
PLAY. WIN PARTS. SELL THEM.
Parts, wheels and spoilers are now genuine Steam Inventory items. Trade them with other players. List them on the Steam Community Market and the sale goes into your Steam Wallet. That Legend turbo you pulled is an asset, not a line in a save file. And you do not have to pay a cent to get in: cases drop for playing. Race, put hours in, open crates, and what comes out is yours to keep, trade, or sell.
Three kinds of case — Parts, Wheels, Spoilers — each with its own loot table.
Every roll happens on Valve's servers. The game does not decide what you got, so the odds on screen are the odds that ran. No client-side luck, for anyone.
Free cases from playing. One per 15 minutes online. Your pile holds 3 and gains a slot every 5 levels, up to 10.
Level up, get a case — minted straight into your Steam inventory.
Market. Buy cases with CR. 250 for your first of the week, doubling each time, capped at 10,000, ten a week. The curve is deliberate: these things are worth real money and a flat price would be a bridge to it.
Crafting
Feed nine parts of one tier, get one of the next tier back.
Craft
Chance
Street → Sport
90%
Sport → Race
70%
Race → Pro
45%
Pro → Legend
20%
A failed craft hands one part back, so it is never a total wipe.
CHECK YOUR INVENTORY. Crafting had a bug where a successful craft was reported as a failure — the game was reading the parts the recipe had just eaten as if one of them were the prize. The upgrade was granted correctly every single time. Only the message lied. If you crafted Street parts before this update and were told it failed, go look for Sport parts you do not remember winning. They are yours.
LEVELS, XP AND RANK
Every race pays XP — 100 for a win, 40 for a loss, 15 for taking a round.
Every level pays a case, minted straight into your Steam inventory.
Rank is decided server-side and stored there. Nobody edits their way up the ladder.
The end-of-race screen walks you through it — rank, then level, then balance. One change at a time instead of two bars moving at once.
Level and rank on the matchmaking card, yours and your opponent's, while you wait.
BRING YOUR WHEEL
We stopped supporting "a wheel" and started supporting wheels. 29 device profiles across Logitech, Thrustmaster, Fanatec and Moza — G29, G920, G923, G27, G25, T300RS, T248, T150, TMX, TX, CSL Elite, CSL DD, ClubSport, Podium, Moza R3 through R21 and more.
Plug in and drive. Devices are recognised by hardware ID, not by the product name the driver happens to report that day. The same wheel used to bind on one machine and refuse on another.
H-pattern gearbox with a real gate, and a clutch you can stall the engine with.
Full calibration for wheel, pedals and handbrake, with per-device rotation ranges.
Share your profile. Export your setup, send it to a friend, import theirs.
Feel tuning continues — if your wheel does something strange, tell us which one it is.
IT RUNS
The biggest performance cost in the game was invisible. Several of the highway's decorative meshes — the border decals, the guard rail, the concrete barrier — were each one continuous 4.6 kilometre object. Culling cannot skip a mesh whose bounds cover the entire map, so 712,000 triangles were drawn every frame no matter where your car was. All of it, everywhere, always.
map_Highway
Before
After
Renderers
12,626
5,450
Shadow casters
10,799
1,548
Triangles drawn regardless of position
712,340
0
Traffic detail levels. Interiors, seats and steering wheels switch off at distance. Glass and lights stay.
Separate framerate caps for menu and race — 90 and 120 by default, both yours to change.
GPU instancing across the garage, a lighter global illumination pass, and a hard budget on how many traffic headlight flares can render at once.
A NEW MAIN MENU
The menu is where you spend the time between races, so it got the same attention as the road.
Level and XP on your profile row, next to your name and rank.
A CASES screen with a proper reveal, a live counter and a badge when something is waiting.
A MARKET page for buying cases with CR.
A CRAFTING screen with manual selection, paged inventory, filters and auto-fill.
A SUPPORT page — answers, links, and a report form that reaches us directly.
Your opponent's level and rank on the matchmaking card while you wait.
Opening a case is an event again
The reveal now plays on its own screen above everything else, and it cannot be closed until your part is on screen — closing mid-spin used to mean never finding out what you won. The part lands with a burst in its rarity colour. And the counters tell the truth. Open a case with six in the bag and it used to still say six; the drop appeared on your next click. Every counter now moves the instant Steam confirms it, and buying or collecting keeps the button busy for exactly as long as Steam actually needs.
ENGINES, RETUNED
The turbo whistle is far quieter. It was loud enough to be genuinely unpleasant on every car.
Part sounds come from the part. Fit a turbo or a muffler and it brings its own audio with it.
Vehicle volume finally has its own slider. It was sharing a save slot with SFX, so your engine volume followed whatever you last did to the SFX slider. Fixed, and it now starts at 50%.
NEW: in-race music. Seven original tracks. One is drawn at random per race and hits on the 3–2–1. It carries across rounds instead of restarting, and when a track ends another follows. Skip with F7 and F8. Runs through the Music slider.
CHECK YOUR AUDIO SETTINGS ONCE. Because vehicle volume was sharing a slot with SFX, everyone starts this update at the new 50% default. If the cars sound different to you, that is the fix — and the slider is yours again.
DRIFT AND HANDLING
Drift mode reworked. Cleaner scoring with a multiplier that climbs as you hold the angle, and the points pay out in CR.
Handling is a real number now. Every car carries a hand-tuned handling figure. It used to read zero until you fitted a part.
The old Lv1–5 CR upgrade ladder is gone. Parts are the tuning path. One system, not two.
YOUR OPPONENT GOT BETTER
Bots overtake traffic instead of queueing behind it, brake on a real stopping-distance profile, and reverse out of a crash rather than sitting against the wall.
Bot cars are matched to yours on power and weight, and follow your own power setting. The duel is decided by driving.
Fixed: from the second match onward the bot did not move at all — it sat on the grid with the handbrake on while the game reported the race as running.
Fixed: your lights, horn and signal keys were also being delivered to the bot.
FIXED
Levels start at 1. A new account reading "level 0" looked like a bug, because it was one.
74 missing strings. One malformed line in a language file had knocked out 74 keys, which is why parts of the interface showed MISSING_KEY. All 18 languages are whole again.
The level label was hardcoded in Turkish. English clients now read "Lv. 4" rather than "Sv. 4" — everywhere it appears.
Case odds were not being applied on Valve's side at all — a syntax detail in the loot table meant every part rolled with equal weight. Corrected and verified live.
The weekly market quota could be exceeded by buying two cases at the same instant.
A second, parallel drop channel meant an honest player received two cases per interval instead of one. Cases now come from exactly one place.
Traffic thinned out to nothing when you slowed down, because spawning was tied to distance travelled rather than to time.
Multiplayer spawns. Host lobbies take up to 10 players, and on the drift map the extra grid rows sat off the edge of the world — every second player fell out of the map.
The parts strip would not scroll; the drag was being swallowed before it reached the list.
Stat bars were scaled against placeholder maximums, so a strong part looked weak.
Lens flares drew straight through the car body from behind.
Zero-stake matches pay 200 CR (was 100).
Startup console errors cleaned out, and a pile of smaller layout and clipping fixes across the parts and case screens.
ONE LAST THING
Almost every fix on this page started as somebody saying "this feels broken". The Support page in the main menu attaches your build and the last lines of your log, which is usually all we need to find the cause without a back-and-forth. Keep telling us. It works. — Traffic Rivals · 1v1 Duels