Hey everyone,
Quick warning: this one is a big one. Not in "new content" size, but in "stuff that was quietly broken and is now fixed" size. I spent a few weeks rewriting the parts of the code I'd been avoiding, and a few of the bugs I found along the way made me laugh out loud.
The big one: for as long as DriveWave has existed, car colors have been applied wrong. You'd pick a red paint, the save would store red, the UI would say red, and the car would spawn... the first color in the list. Every single time. Turns out there was a = 0 sitting right on top of the saved index, overwriting it before it could do anything. Your saved colors have been sitting there this whole time. They finally come out now.
🎨 Paint & wheels
Car color and vinyl finally respect the saved index. Your previously-picked paint is already there, it just couldn't come out to play.
Rim and wheel customization now applies in driving mode (it was being destroyed on spawn and never rebuilt).
Rims and wheels also sync to cars parked in car lots, so the ones around the map match what you own.
Garage UI re-syncs when another context changes a color/vinyl, no more stale "5/10" text.
🏁 Driving feel
New Initial D / Underground 2 style chase camera. Smoother peek on turns, no more discrete snap when the yaw crosses a threshold.
Visual weight transfer. Cars dive under braking and squat under throttle, scaled to how fast the car actually is.
Launch grace for slow cars. Weaker cars (0-60 around 25s) get a small boost off the line so they feel responsive instead of glued.
4th-gear jerk at ~160 km/h is gone. The sim was briefly telling the car it was going backwards when yaw wobbled, and the brake pedal would slam full for a single frame. Fixed.
Shift "throttle cut" feel smoothed. The engine was dipping on every upshift because releaseGasPedalAtShifting was on. Now it's a soft dip at 0.08s, your brain reads it as a shift instead of a lift.
🔊 Audio
Car audio slider is actually unified now. Electric cars had their wind hardcoded to 1.0 and their non-engine sounds scaled to the engine, which meant the slider did almost nothing on EVs and muted everything on ICE cars. One slider, one behavior, all cars.
BGM double-trigger stutter fixed (manual crossfade and Unity's auto-loop were fighting).
Engine volume no longer double-tweens on every slider drag.
⏱ Acceleration timer
Added a 0-100 km/h / 0-60 mph timer for typing-mode cars. Auto-switches to your chosen unit. Just press accelerate, it'll track the rest.
🅿 Car lots
Lot save order swapped. Lot is persisted before currency is spent, so if the game crashes in the micro-window between the two, you get a free lot instead of losing money. Failure mode now favors the player.
Alt-tabbing no longer double-flushes to disk (pause and focus were both firing).
💾 Under the hood (the part you'll only notice when it's quiet)
I want to be transparent about this because it affects all of you. The save system has been rewritten to be multi-file, async, and much more paranoid about corruption.
Saves now write in the background on a 15-second schedule. No more tiny stutter when something hits the disk.
Each save file (game, car lots, unlocks, wheels) has its own cache and flush lock. One file going bad can no longer nuke the others.
If a save file fails to load, we try the backup, then rebuild from the in-memory cache, and if that also fails the file is quarantined (renamed, not deleted, because I'd rather have something to look at later than nothing at all).
The "playtime stops counting after 60 hours" bug is gone. One bool flag was telling the save "you already did this" forever. Sorry to everyone who hit that.
As always, if something is behaving weird, drop me a message on Discord. The forums work too but Discord is where I actually see things fast.
A few of these came from players pointing out specific weirdness over the last few weeks. Thanks for sticking with me while I dug through the old code.
More patches on the way.
See you on the road.
– Tolga 🏁