DriveWave v2.0 - The One Where You Are Not Driving Alone
Hey everyone,
Last time I posted here was the fullscreen patch on 2 August. In that post I said the first piece of multiplayer would be "the hub only" and that nothing was playable yet.
Six weeks later this is v2.0. Multiplayer, an endless procedural road with three ways to drive it, rally, drag, police chases, 76 new cars, a livery editor, 70 new rims, 30 spoilers, and a driving model that went through more passes than I want to admit. The changelog for this period is longer than the game's entire changelog before it. It is essentially a remake at this point. Grab a coffee.
If you only read one line: everyone in a session has to be on this version. Older builds cannot join a v2.0.2 lobby, and v2.0.2 cannot join theirs.
🚗 You can drive with other people now
This is the big one. DriveWave has multiplayer.
- There is a meet zone where cars park up on pads. You start a session from there, join one with a code, or jump in from your Steam friends list.
- Everyone sees your car the way you actually built it. Paint, livery, stickers, rims, rim size, spoiler. Damage too, and the repair.
- The host picks the mode, the world seed and the biomes, so everyone is driving the same road, not a lookalike.
- Traffic is synced. The host runs it and sends it out, which took an embarrassing number of attempts before it stopped teleporting.
- Other players' cars are solid. You can bump into them. Whether you should is between you and them.
- Every mode below works in a session. Cruise the endless road together, run a rally event, line up at the drag strip, or split into cops and runners.
- The multiplayer panel shows a summary of whatever mode is selected right next to the buttons: format, round length, how many people are ready. No more opening the big lobby window just to check.
- New setting: "Multiplayer exit gap". How long the game waits before dropping you out of the session after you leave the drive. Default 10 seconds.
🛣️ Endless: the road that does not end
This is the new heart of the game. A road that generates in front of you as you drive, forever, through biomes that hand over to each other: green forest, black forest, autumn, farmland, meadow, lake, alpine, desert, canyon, Miami coast, a harbour, and two new ones added this week, Green Mountain Pass and Misty Pine Forest. About a quarter of the coastal runs now come out Mediterranean, with olive trees, lavender, pale rock and a sea 14 metres below the road.
Same seed, same road. Change the seed, get a different one. Pick which biomes you want and how long each one lasts, so you can stay in the mountains for as long as you like.
Three ways to drive it:
- Chill. Two lane road, normal traffic, no timer, no score. Drive, or let the autopilot drive while you type. This is the mode you leave running. A white analog rev dial with a red needle and a cyan digital speed and gear readout, reading real engine RPM with a redline that follows the car.
- Touge. Mountain passes with actual 160 degree hairpins. Rivals run a proper racing line instead of hugging the middle, and they have tempers.
- Gridlock. Three lanes of heavy traffic, no lifting. You know the one. There is always a gap. You just have to want it.
What lives on that road now:
- Weather and night. Rain, snow, fog, storms, a day/night cycle, moon phases, aurora, clouds that move. All toggles per mode, and the rain has its own frequency and intensity sliders.
- Rest stops and meeting places. Fuel stations, cafes, viewpoints, forest car parks, small markets, campsites. Every one has six empty bays so you and your friends can park side by side and pretend you are at a car meet.
- Roadworks on dual carriageways. Real loaders, dump trucks and a cement mixer, cones, barriers, warning signs, three people in hard hats standing around. No automatic fines. It is decoration, not a speed trap.
- Patrol cars mixed into normal traffic with the sirens off. In Chill they only come after you if you hit one. There is a "Speeding starts a police chase" option if you want them to care about your speed, off by default. Touge and Gridlock have the chase toggle off by default because you are there to drive, not to run. Each mode has its own Police Chase toggle and a Police Density slider. In multiplayer only players within 250 metres of whoever started the chase get pulled in. If you are 5 km up the road you keep driving.
- Missions arrive in waves while you drive, with a timer and a chain to work through, all on one card.
- Tunnels, bridges, beaches, breakdown bays with a stranded car and someone waiting next to it, and a lot more detail at the edge of the road and far beyond it. The distant hills are not empty anymore.
- Trees light up in your headlights at night. They never did before. I checked, and they were pure black silhouettes this entire time.
- Advanced driving settings per mode: traffic flow (calm, normal, fast), traffic density from 0 to 200%, curve and hill intensity, rest stop frequency, night brightness, wind and traffic volume, and an autopilot target speed. Everyone who asked what cruise control was for: it pays you now, and you can tell it how fast to go.
- Vegetation density slider in Display settings, 0 to 100%, applied instantly, for anyone whose GPU has opinions about forests.
🏁 Rally Stage
Point to point stages on gravel, tarmac, mud, snow, sand, ash and dirt, across 13 biomes from a snowy forest to a volcano.
- Three formats: Race Week (1 to 12 stages against eight simulated drivers, with an overall standings table), Time Attack, and Hotlap.
- A stage planner lets you build your own event.
- Each biome has five fixed roads plus a daily one, and the five roads are genuinely different. Road 1 is a short flowing thing, Road 5 is a 10 km climb and descent over several ridges.
- Pace notes with timing, size and count settings. A personal best ghost.
- The starts are a love letter to Sega Rally. Crowds on the banks, flags, a countdown that holds the car until GO.
- Your tyres compact the snow, sand and mud under them and the tracks stay there.
- The road surface changes along the stage: bumps, dips and ruts that come and go, hardest on dirt, barely there on tarmac.
- Rally settings: pick the weather and whether the road starts wet, set the auto recovery delay, and switch off any HUD element you do not want.
- Service tents, flags and orange safety nets along the stage. I put my own logo on the tents because nobody else was going to sponsor me.
- The stage is over when the finish screen says so, not when you think it is.
🚦 Drag Race
Quarter mile, half mile, full mile and an endless run. Proper staging, a real light tree, foul starts, and best of 1, 3, 5 or 7 series against a friend. If nobody is around there is an offline gauntlet ladder with seven rivals to climb.
🚔 Police Chase
Solo against AI cops, or in a lobby as "escape together" or "cops and runners" with up to 8 players. Every rule is in the settings now: starting cop count, cop skill, round length, aggression, backup frequency, heat, escape timer, civilian traffic. Three presets (Relaxed, Balanced, Intense) if you do not want to touch all of that. The cops got a brain transplant too: they follow the road instead of cutting straight at you, slow down before crests and corners, and can actually keep up now.
🗺️ Real world roads
Pick a place on the map and drive the actual road layout from there, with the real terrain height under it. This one was rewritten from scratch in the middle of August, then fixed again after players sent screenshots of Istanbul roads doing things roads should not do. This is highly experimental and tends to be broken, so you can say it is in Alpha.
⌨️ The typing screen
- The typing screen follows the same day and night as the road now. Same sky, same fog, and every car in the fleet has real headlights that come on at dusk.
- You can spin the car in the tune screen, sideways and over the top, and the camera hands over to the spoiler when you are fitting one.
- Factory vinyls have a toggle. If a car shipped with a livery you never liked, turn it off and it is a clean body.
🚘 Cars
- 72 Wave Edition drift cars, in Stage 1 to Stage 3 builds. They drop while you drive.
- Four Formula open wheelers with 3.5 litre V12s, because I wanted to hear them. They were also 24% too big in the first build and I only noticed when one would not fit in a lane.
- A proper car browser. Tabs by brand, rarity, year, drivetrain or power, with a rendered photo on every card instead of a name in a list.
- The upgrade screen was rebuilt. Stats on the left, categories on the right, a bar per upgrade showing base value and what the upgrade adds. There is a "Buy what you can" button that spends your balance on the cheapest levels first, for people who just want the number to go up.
- Commercial traffic: trucks, vans, car transporters with cars on the deck. Traffic vehicles have rarity now, so the road is not the same five cars forever.
🎨 Making it yours
- Livery editor. Stickers, brush strokes, layers, a colour wheel and an eyedropper. You can drag your own image in, and you can share a livery with a short code.
- Custom paint on the body, separate from the factory colour.
- 70 new rims. 50 from the RIMS pack and 20 Veyra designs, with rim sizing and rim paint. The rim fitting screen is a compact panel under the car now, with front/rear tabs. Scrolling the list no longer fits a rim by accident.
- 30 spoilers. New Spoiler tab in the garage. Pick the model, colour and size, then nudge it forward, back, up or down a centimetre at a time until it sits right.
🔧 How it drives
- Suspension, weight transfer and body roll went through several passes. You can feel the surface change under the tyres. Grass throws dust, wet asphalt throws spray, and the spray no longer leaves big grey rings behind the car.
- Gear changes, engine braking, the rev limiter and slipstream are all part of the physics instead of being sound effects.
- Visual damage on your car and on everyone else, one key to repair it, and a settings toggle if you would rather your car stayed perfect.
- Cars get dirty. Mud in the forest, dust in the desert, salt in the snow, and in rally it gets into the rims and tyres too. Repair cleans it.
- Steering wheel support with pedal axis assignment. Keyboard, gamepad and wheel no longer fight over the same inputs. mantisphoenix asked "When direct drive wheel support?" and the honest answer is: it is in, tell me how badly it works.
- Gamepad rumble. Surface, wheelspin and impacts come through the controller.
- The AI got rebuilt. One brain for rivals and for the autopilot, with late braking and a temper that shows up when you push the cruise setting to the top.
- The autopilot now finishes an overtake or backs out of it based on how much road is actually left and how fast the oncoming car is. It used to bail on a fixed distance, which is why it kept pulling back in front of a lorry it had not finished passing.
- Rally cars were being braked by the ground itself. The rolling resistance on gravel, snow and dirt was tuned for slow speeds and became a parachute at fast ones. Same 12 seconds of full throttle on gravel: 139 km/h before, 206 after.
- Traffic reacts to being hit like it has mass now, and stops treating you as a crash when you pass it with 6 cm to spare in the opposite lane. Stopped traffic no longer flips itself over when the network nudges it.
📟 HUD and settings
- Police Chase has its own compact HUD with the round timer, durability bar and closest cop distance in one place.
- The Settings window is the same for General, Chill, Gridlock, Touge, Rally and Police Chase now. Categories at the top, Steam and Discord buttons in a fixed footer, two columns when there is room. Arno89 and Pinhapple: the "+1 000 km" button you had to resize the window to click should be reachable at any window size now. If it is not, I want to know.
- Background FPS limit in Display settings. Default 15 when the game is not focused, so it stops eating your GPU while you are on Discord.
- All buttons in the game finally share the same hover, press and click sound. Same palette too: cyan for hover, darker cyan for selected.
🔊 Sound
- New engine recordings across the fleet, matched to engine layout, so a W16 is not borrowing a four cylinder any more.
- Tyre noise and surface effects follow what is actually under the wheels.
🎵 Jukebox
The music screen was rebuilt. The library got narrower, the player got shorter, and the DJ stage in the corner stays visible while you browse.
- Six radio stations: Synthwave FM, Lo-Fi Lounge, Bass District, Rock Route, Techno Terminal and Cruise FM. Every one of the 193 tracks lives on at least one of them. Switching to a station does not touch your own playlist any more, and the game brings you back to it when you switch off. That one was a real bug: changing station used to overwrite your saved list on the spot.
- Album filter. All seven soundtrack volumes, Vol. 7 down to Vol. 1, in the order they were released. Switch it to a genre filter if you would rather browse that way.
- Search by track, artist or album. Filters stack, so "Vol. 4, instrumental, contains 'night'" works.
- Instrumental is its own button now, and every instrumental track carries a small blue tag next to its genre tag, in the list and in the now playing bar.
- Favourites. The heart on any track adds it to your playlist or takes it out, in the list or in the player. Removing the track that is playing does not stop it.
- Spotify button on every track that has one, in the list and in the player.
- The track that is playing is highlighted, and tracks without cover art get a proper icon instead of a blank square.
🧹 As always, the small things
- Fullscreen on the Skydeck, Drive and Garage screens, now including the Police Chase lobby and results. Ultrawide black bars no longer block clicks on what is behind them.
- Linteckh asked about "the game hiding itself when opening it while it was closed on another screen". The window now checks which monitor it is on when it comes back and moves itself onto a visible one. I could not reproduce your exact setup, so please tell me if it still hides.
- Discord rich presence that says what you are actually doing: the mode, the speed, how many friends you are driving with, whether it is raining.
- Photo mode.
- A quiet mode that hides the HUD.
- A separate odometer file, so your distance is safe even if something else goes wrong.
- Four new leaderboards: top speed, total play time, achievements earned, drag wins. Every rally route gets its own board too. And the upload errors that used to spam you are gone.
- Achievements tab redesigned, with filters and the original artwork on every card.
- Steam Input: if your controller is not recognised, set the DriveWave layout in Steam to Templates, then Gamepad. The game also picks up controllers that were already plugged in at launch now.
- A once-a-minute hitch while driving turned out to be the audio system asking Unity to clean up memory every 60 seconds. It does not do that anymore.
- Memory in general got a pass: leaking meshes, a garage showcase car that never left, damaged traffic cars keeping their dented copies forever. Rim and spoiler textures shrunk. If the game used to creep up in RAM the longer you drove, it should not now.
🚧 What is not in this one
There is a night city free roam map in the files. It is not in the mode list yet because it is not finished, and I would rather you did not find it by accident.
This is by far the biggest patch DriveWave has had, and a lot of it was built in the same six weeks. There will be things I broke without noticing. Discord is the fastest way to reach me, and the forum works too. If something in multiplayer feels off, tell me which version your friend was on first, because it is probably that.
I love how this game has turned out. It started as a side project I was building with my kids to escape burnout, and now it is essentially a love letter to every NFS, Sega Rally and Colin McRae I grew up playing. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do, because I am genuinely having a great time with what I have built. I plan to take this game much further with updates over the coming years.
And now my attention turns back to Metal Thunder, because I have to deliver 1.0 over there for an amazing community, and it is in the last stretch. That one is a love letter to CoD and AC-130s. So until then my focus will be on Metal Thunder, and new content or system changes here can be a bit delayed. I have not found anything game breaking so far, but if you run into something, you know where to find me and I will fix it ASAP.
Here's to the next one.
See you on the road.
- Tolga 🏁