Hey everyone,
First of all thank you for all the love for v2.0. Also please don't forget to leave a review for the game to let others know what you think about DriveWave. Every single review counts!
In the v2.0 post I said I was turning my attention back to Metal Thunder. Then I kept finding things in DriveWave that bothered me.
A car that could rev happily without actually going anywhere. Trees hovering above the ground. Grass growing through somebody's house. An instructor car that apparently did not need a shadow. And a driving HUD that was very good at showing you everything except the road.
So here we are. A driving academy with 80 main tests, five optional skill challenges and a bonus circuit. Another substantial pass over the handling. More control settings, a proper statistics screen, a much larger achievement list, ways to find your friends on the road, and menus that have finally been reminded fullscreen exists.
This covers the work since the v2.0 announcement. It got long again.
Multiplayer reminder: everyone in a session needs the updated build. The network protocol has changed since v2.0.
🏫 DriveWave Academy
I wanted somewhere you could take a car, learn what it does when you brake too late, and immediately try again. That became an entire mode as an homage to old GTs
- 80 main tests across five levels: Foundations, Corner Flow, Precision, Advanced Control and Final Challenges. Sixteen tests in each.
- Acceleration and precise stopping, slalom, hairpins, linked corners, double apexes, chicanes, blind crests, climbs, descents, gravel, snow and complete circuit laps.
- Instructor laps where you follow the guide car. Stay close, keep it clean and resist the urge to overtake the teacher.
- Instructor cars now use the same vehicle physics, suspension, wheel movement, lights and sounds as normal driving cars. The teacher has to use the pedals too.
- Instructors plan a racing line for each circuit, setting up for corners, approaching the apex and opening up on exit. Linked corners get smoother transitions instead of a permanent trip down the middle of the road.
- Removed the extra slowdown that made instructors wait for the medal timetable. Their straight-line speed ceiling is 10% higher, with braking and corner speed planned around the racing line, surface and car.
- Five optional Skill Yard challenges with cone courses, target cones, spirals and precision exercises. Bronze has no time limit in these, and they do not block your licence progression.
- Marmara Circuit: a separate 5.338 km bonus lap, with its own medals, personal best and ghost. That makes 86 activities in total.
- Every test supplies a fixed loan car. You do not need to buy it first, and your own car stays parked while you are in the lesson.
- Earn Bronze in all sixteen tests to open the next level. Academy progression does not lock you out of the other driving modes.
- Gold, Silver and Bronze targets, saved personal bests, level completion medals and a ghost of your best valid attempt.
- Recalibrated medal times using physics-driven runs in the supplied cars. Demonstrations use the test's actual rolling start, and parking after the finish no longer adds time to the completed lap.
- First-time medal rewards: 500 credits for Bronze, another 750 for Silver and another 1,250 for Gold. Repeating the same medal does not pay again.
- Test briefings show the supplied car, route map, instructions, personal best and target times. Longer instructions have a visible scrollbar.
- Demonstrations use the driving physics now. The car steers, accelerates, brakes and turns its wheels. The original moving display model was not doing a convincing job of teaching anybody to drive.
- Follow demonstrations use the instructor's racing-line system and react to its actual speed and gap. Pausing and resuming preserves both cars' movement; demonstrations do not award medals or credits.
- Academy uses the normal driving camera, instruments and control bindings, with the shared rally handling profile. Test-specific assist rules and fixed conditions still apply.
- Per-test leaderboards for qualifying runs, with the test rules and supplied car kept together.
- Find it through Select Mode → License Trials. Academy is a solo mode; leave the multiplayer session before starting a test.
🏁 Somewhere to take those tests
The academy needed more than a flat brown field with a few cones on it. There was a period where it had exactly that. You noticed.
- Dedicated training areas and closed circuits across airfield, countryside, forest, desert and snowy mountain settings.
- Longer technical layouts with elevation changes, tighter sequences, crests and descents, alongside the short individual lessons.
- An airfield proving ground with hangars, service areas and space for braking and cone exercises.
- Trackside service vehicles, marshal areas, shelters, barriers, fences and properly placed circuit props.
- Denser woodland, bushes, grass and small rocks around the courses, with clear space kept around the road and buildings.
- Biome-specific shoulders: dirt and gravel in the countryside, darker soil in the forest, sandy gravel in the desert and dirty snow blending into clean snow.
- Red-and-white kerbs follow the inside of corners. They no longer run along every straight just because there is an edge to put them on.
- Tyre barriers follow the road shoulder and sit on the ground. Tree placement also respects the buried roots instead of lifting the entire tree by them.
- Stopping areas have much stronger ground hatching and visible course markers. The repeated tall cyan placeholder gates are gone from the short lessons.
- Doubled stopping-box length from 8 to 16 metres. Ground hatching, roadside cones, accepted stopping positions and precision tolerances all match the larger box.
- Darker asphalt, softer kerb colours and more restrained circuit lighting.
- Trackside barrier wraps for DriveWave, Dumbbell Games and beindie, with grey edging.
📟 Academy presentation
- Five illustrated licence cards, with a separate environment behind each level's test list and briefing: airfield, woodland, snow, sunset and an evening circuit.
- Each level has its own cone colour too: orange, green, ice blue, coral and violet. The selected cone brightens without changing to a different colour.
- Larger, properly aligned test numbers, clear progress and the actual loan car shown in the middle.
- New gold, silver and bronze trophy artwork throughout the academy.
- A compact rectangular LCD-style driving HUD. Timing and medal targets sit at the edge; the middle of the screen stays open.
- Full instructions appear during the countdown and pause. Live skill progress remains visible when the lesson needs it.
- Smaller driving instruments, removal of the duplicate lower timer/distance panel and the unused academy autopilot row, and a limit on HUD growth in fullscreen.
- Successful runs get a result presentation with the earned trophy, time, credits and a slow camera orbit around the car.
- Failed runs keep the last driving image, reveal the failure reason and bring in Retry and Tests with an animated transition. You can still use the restart shortcut.
- Tests returns to the current licence's test list. It no longer sends you straight back to the lobby.
- Fixed cursor visibility and control handover in demonstrations, pause and results. Retry restores the driving camera and input.
🔧 The handling got another round
This is the less visible part of the update, but probably the part you will feel first. Several systems were trying to help the same car at the same time, and occasionally they had very different ideas about what helping meant.
- Acceleration, braking and cornering now work against the same tyre grip limit. Traction control and ABS work within that model too.
- Removed overlapping sideways pushes, extra body rotation forces and stacked acceleration multipliers that were fighting the tyre physics.
- Reworked progressive grip loss and recovery so a small slide gives you room to adjust before the stronger recovery assistance comes in.
- Quicker keyboard turn-in, centring and left/right changes. Steering no longer pauses at the centre while you are trying to catch a slide.
- Countersteering has more useful angle when the car is sliding, while ordinary high-speed steering keeps its limits. Manual input and automatic countersteer no longer pile a second full correction on top of each other.
- Short keyboard brake presses build pressure progressively. Analog pedals keep their proportional response.
- Corrected front/rear brake balance and retuned service braking. Applying the service brake also stops the drivetrain from continuing to push against it.
- Acceleration respects the car's configured sprint performance and tapers more gradually toward top speed.
- Suspension and damping use the actual front/rear load distribution. Switching between road and rally setups preserves the car's proper baseline.
- Manual transmission and optional manual clutch. Automatic and manual modes share the same engine, RPM and gearing calculations. Neutral and an open clutch disconnect drive and engine braking.
- Normal and Simulation steering options, plus separate traction control, stability control and ABS settings.
- Corrected gearing errors in several cars, including the Akira Renza's refusal to accelerate properly. A misplaced decimal can make a surprisingly effective handbrake.
- Fixed ride-height and wheel-contact mismatches, including older Jarger models. Changing wheel and tyre size now updates the physical contact as well as the visual wheel.
- Reduced the metallic shine on matte tyre surfaces.
🏎️ Rally, road driving and the camera
- Rally's normal handling profile has more immediate turn-in, a wider controllable slide and smoother grip recovery.
- Lift-off and light braking help adjust the car's attitude through the tyres. Small slides receive less intrusive throttle correction.
- Retuned gravel, dirt, snow, mud, ice and off-road response. Snow is easier to place, ice remains the slippery one, and leaving the road is less likely to turn the car into something you cannot steer back.
- Improved rally service braking and engine braking, while retaining neutral, clutch and assist preferences.
- Smoothed per-wheel changes between surfaces, so crossing an edge does not instantly snap the whole car to a different response.
- Rally and road handling remain separate profiles. Switching modes, using autopilot or restarting a loan car no longer leaves the camera and physics on different settings.
- The chase camera reacts more clearly to acceleration, braking, bumps and landings, with smoother corner look-ahead.
- Added a saved Driving camera choice in Gameplay settings: Default or Corner follow. The alternate view follows the car's turning direction more actively.
- Sliding the body around no longer produces a false braking movement in the camera.
- Reduced the excessive rally speed FOV and vibration. The Camera Motion setting still controls the effect.
- Fixed photo-mode camera and HUD handover.
- Refined the alternate rally gauge, its transparency and fullscreen layout, and the coloured direction/severity presentation of pace notes.
- Rally personal-best displays and time leaderboards now include the car, year and edition where that information is available. Old scores without vehicle data still display normally.
- Offline score uploads keep the time and the car that actually set it together.
- Chill's odometer shows the selected car's total driving distance, rather than only the current session.
🎮 Controls and wheel setup
- A dedicated Controls page with 34 rebindable actions, separate keyboard/mouse and gamepad assignments, and separate reset-to-default buttons.
- Rebinding can be cancelled or cleared. Conflicting bindings in the same context are rejected, while separate contexts such as photo mode can reuse a key.
- Driving, shifting, clutch, camera, headlights, recovery, photo mode, rally restart and HUD controls use the shared bindings.
- A Wheel settings page with steering-centre and endpoint calibration, throttle/brake/clutch calibration, paddle and handbrake assignment, and live input readouts.
- Starting profiles for Logitech G29 and Moza R3, plus support for assigning pedals on a separate USB device. Existing custom calibration is kept.
- Force feedback based on the front tyres, with strength, damping, road detail and inversion settings. Feedback stops when you enter menus, lose focus, disconnect the device or leave the car.
- Physical wheel input uses its calibrated position directly, without keyboard steering ramps or automatic countersteering being added to it.
- More detailed gamepad vibration, with separate controls for surface, tyre/brake, impact and engine/shift effects. Feedback follows the active driving device.
The G29 and R3 profiles still need feedback from people with those actual devices. If something is backwards, silent or trying to tear the wheel out of your hands, tell me the model and your settings. I am not calling every wheel tested because a settings screen exists.
🔊 The sounds that were missing
- Academy starts use the rally countdown and GO sounds.
- Fixed tyre screech being muted in the academy because the normal driving panel was hidden.
- Restored missing shared bump, impact and scraping sound references on cars that did not have them assigned.
- Contact sounds no longer depend on the engine-audio component being present.
- Master, SFX and vehicle volume settings now reach the tyre/contact sound paths consistently.
- Shared surface sounds follow the current loan car and its actual surface. Pause, countdown, results and closed sessions stop stale contact loops.
- Fixed academy headlights and high-beam flashing, and restored the instructor car's shadows.
- Dust, snow spray, tyre smoke and asphalt skid marks work on the generated academy surfaces. Rolling on loose ground can produce particles without requiring a drift.
- Fixed an emitter timing issue that could repeatedly round the first particle down to nothing, and effects inheriting an inactive world's parent object.
🌲 The scenery has been told where the ground is
- Denser distant forests in Endless, Rally, Academy and forest areas in Real World, while retaining vegetation-density limits.
- Snowy biomes use the selected spruce A1 and B1 trees for a more consistent winter look.
- Shared placement rules for grounding, slopes, water, road clearance and occupied building space.
- Fixed grass, rocks and other loose props intersecting roadside buildings, including when neighbouring road sections load in a different order.
- Fixed terrain triangles protruding above the road surface. The visible ground, collision surface and prop placement use the same corrected heights.
- Added/fixed collision on roadside railings and barriers that the car could previously drive through.
- Better fitting collision on structures with openings, rather than treating every object as one large solid box.
- Improved cleanup of generated tyre-mark meshes, surface effects and temporary materials when changing or closing a driving area.
👥 Multiplayer and opponents
- Optional player indicators with three choices: Off, Name only, or Name + profile picture. They start disabled, and the setting is saved locally.
- Smaller name labels shrink and fade with distance. Crowded distant labels are hidden, and labels stay inside the driving view instead of covering the menus around it.
- In Chill, use Teleport behind in the player list to join a friend on the road. Press Y to move behind the nearest available multiplayer driver; the shortcut is rebindable.
- Friend teleport checks the destination for cars and obstacles and has a short cooldown. It is unavailable during Rally, Academy, active pursuits, photo mode and menu/map transitions.
- Reworked player-to-player impact transfer to account for vehicle mass and avoid applying the same contact twice.
- Improved propagation of damage, repairs, headlights and high-beam state.
- Expanded shared world settings so players at the same place get consistent weather, fog and road wetness. Session settings do not overwrite your saved personal preferences.
- Traffic state and crash motion are ordered and synchronised more consistently. An old packet no longer replaces newer movement.
- Smoothed traffic position, rotation and recovery after impacts, including small corrections on stopped vehicles.
- Rally starts line players up with spacing instead of spawning everyone on top of each other, with a configurable departure interval.
- Drag opponents pick up the appropriate car appearance, paint, rims, spoiler and livery. AI opponents also get consistent colour variation.
🏆 More achievements, and safer progress
- Expanded the in-game achievement list from 36 to 120: 84 additions with individual retro artwork.
- More goals for play time, typing, speed, rally finishes, drag wins, collecting cars and escaping pursuits.
- Longer-term challenges for Endless distance, night and rain driving, improving rally records, and completing wet, foggy, snowy and long stages.
- Drag challenges for clean close finishes, fast reactions, hard AI wins and complete Gauntlet championships.
- High-heat escapes and fully completed mission waves have their own progress goals.
- Corrected the long-rally requirement to stages of at least 10 km, so the target matches the routes the game actually generates.
- Existing achievement identities and unlocks are preserved. Existing recorded totals can count toward relevant new goals; events that were never tracked are not invented retroactively.
- New achievement names and descriptions are translated into 24 languages.
- Play-time progress is checkpointed every 15 seconds, instead of depending only on losing focus or closing the game properly.
- Fixed cases where a temporary read failure could replace progress with zero, or a scene reload could count the same session twice.
- Improved recovery of play-time progress from valid local records and available Steam achievement/leaderboard data. Time that was never saved anywhere cannot be reconstructed.
📊 There is a statistics screen now for driving
- Open Statistics from the garage/lobby for General, Car, Typing, Driving, Rally, Drag and Police Chase tabs.
- Career totals alongside the selected car's own specifications, upgrades and separate typing/driving odometers.
- Rally records and condition-specific finishes; drag best times, reactions and Gauntlet results; pursuit escapes and mission-wave progress.
- Separate top-ten lists for your most-used typing and driving cars, ranked by distance actually travelled.
- Purchased distance is shown separately from driven/typed distance. Missing records display a dash instead of a fictional zero-second best.
- Statistics text is translated into 24 languages.
🎵 Menus, music and the smaller fixes
- A standalone jukebox panel from the Music button, using your existing library, playlist, filters, favourites and player. The DJ view remains available too.
- Typing into the jukebox search no longer triggers driving, recovery, camera, autopilot or headlight shortcuts.
- Moved desktop-window controls into Display settings and removed the catch-all All tab.
- Improved car-browser filtering, card layout, scrolling and narrow-window behaviour.
- Driving instrument layout is shared more consistently across Chill, Touge and Gridlock.
- Buttons scale from their visual centre. Keyboard/controller focus now follows the same feedback as mouse interaction, and moving the pointer away does not clear an active selection.
- Disabled buttons retain their disabled appearance, including when a parent panel disables them.
- Fixed cursor capture after Alt-Tab, focus return and pause. Returning to the window requires a fresh driving-control click instead of immediately losing the pointer.
- Improved menu scrolling, fixed action areas and text sizing at small window sizes.
- Fixed academy camera/skybox cleanup and the destroyed-Skybox exception when changing views.
- More reliable cleanup when a training session is disabled or closed, so its camera, controls and audio do not remain attached to an old loan car.
🖥️ Fullscreen is allowed now, apparently
The rally menu could grow in all the wrong directions while the academy sat in the middle looking like it had opened inside somebody else's window. Stage results could disappear behind the view entirely. That needed a proper pass.
- Shared fullscreen layout rules for windows and driving views, respecting the screen's safe area and keeping content within a maximum 16:9 aspect ratio.
- Reworked fullscreen Rally selection, mode selection and Academy sizing. Wide mode menus use two columns, and Academy makes better use of the available space.
- Fixed stray header strips and menu borders remaining above the fullscreen view, and restored the original layout when leaving fullscreen.
- Fixed stage-complete presentations and rally results appearing behind fullscreen layers. Maps, leaderboards and achievement popups also use the correct layer order.
- More consistent button, text and scrolling layouts across small windows, 16:9, 16:10 and ultrawide displays.
- Focus loss clears unfinished button press/hover animations instead of leaving buttons stuck in an enlarged state.
🎮 Gamepad menus and Steam Deck work
- Added controller navigation across mode selection, Rally, Academy, settings, car selection, the map and the jukebox. Focus goes to the active window and returns when a child window closes.
- Lists scroll to keep the selected item visible; sliders and dropdowns handle directional input and Back consistently.
- Academy supports Menu/Start for pause and resume, with Back returning through the appropriate menu or test list. The rebindable return-to-menu action respects existing custom B assignments.
- Menu, pause and Steam Overlay inputs are kept out of the driving controls. Held buttons must be released before they can act again after returning to the game.
- Added Steam's floating keyboard requests for controller-focused text fields and Deck touch selection, including lobby-code entry. Delayed keyboard-close notifications no longer close the next field you selected.
- Rally restart hints show the current binding, and Menu can cancel a controller rebind.
- Fixed settings losing their Back destination when opened again, and input remaining blocked during a scene transition without an active UI event system.
The menus were checked at 1280×800, and controller navigation has automated coverage. Actual Steam Deck hardware, the Steam keyboard on-device, Proton performance and sleep/wake still need hands-on testing. This is progress toward playing comfortably on Deck, not a Deck Verified announcement.
🐧 Linux and Proton work
There is more compatibility work here, but I want to be precise about what that means.
- Added a standard-window path for native Linux, with normal window scaling and fullscreen behaviour.
- Windows builds under Wine/Proton avoid the transparency and automatic click-through behaviour involved in disappearing-window problems.
This still needs testing on actual Linux and Proton desktops. The native Linux path does not offer every Windows desktop-window feature, and background typing under Proton is not guaranteed. This is compatibility work, not a claim that every setup is now sorted.
One last thing
Road driving and rally still have their own handling character. What I have been bringing together is the stuff they should agree on: which car you are controlling, which controls it uses, how its instruments read it, and whether its tyres are allowed to make a noise. Switching modes should not feel like you found a different version of the same car by accident.
There are a lot of academy tests, and the medal targets will need feedback from real runs. If one feels unreasonable, send me the test number. If a car feels wrong, send me the car, mode, surface and input device. A short clip helps more than trying to describe the exact noise you made when it spun.
Thank you for all the screenshots, reports and very direct opinions about where the HUD should go. There is considerably more road visible now.
See you on the road.
- Tolga 🏁