DriveWave v1.5.200 – The One Where We Pop the Hood

Bigger one this time. The last week or so was supposed to be "just clean up the launch feel a little" and somehow turned into a full per-car upgrade system, a garage hub redesign, and a profiler bloodbath. You know how it goes.

Here's what's new.

Per-car upgrades

Every car in your garage now has its own upgrade tree. 16 upgrades. Things like Cruise Control (with a toggle, in case you actually want to drive it yourself), Turbocharger, Long-Range Tank, Racing Tires, Pit Lane Pro (refuel without slowing down, finally), Auto-Refuel, Nitrous Kit, and a few more. Costs scale per car, save data is per car, and your old saves are completely untouched. You just open a car and start at level 0 across the board.

Actual idle features

DriveWave was always typing-first, but a few of you (and honestly me too, between coding sessions) wanted it to keep ticking when you step away. The new Idle Core and Fuel/Maintenance branches lean into that. Cruise Control gives you a throttle floor that scales up to 65% with no input, so the car keeps rolling on its own. Idle RPM raises the minimum speed the car coasts at. Auto-Refuel handles the tank for you. Pit Lane Pro lets you refuel without even slowing down. Stack a few of these on a fuel-efficient car with Long-Range Tank and ECU Remap, and you can leave it running in the corner of your screen earning credits while you do something else. Then come back, swap to a faster car, and try to beat your own passive run with active typing. It's still your call which mode you play in, the game just respects both now.

The garage got a hub

The wheel customization screen is now a proper customization hub with two subpanels, Wheels and Upgrades. Tab in, tweak, tab back. Body color and vinyl navigation now live in the wheel garage main panel too, so you can flip through colors and vinyls without bouncing back to the main garage.

Stat cards are upgrade-aware now. When you buy a Turbocharger, the top speed bar shows you what you gained, with a "+25%" delta on the side. Same for acceleration, fuel tank, fuel efficiency, weight, and HP. The old fuel efficiency bar duplication is gone (it was confusing, fuel tank size and fuel consumption are two different things, and the bar pretended they were one).

Cars that actually accelerate

The launch and post-launch acceleration was way too sluggish. You needed to type for ~60 sustained seconds before the car would commit to full throttle, and the first 2-3 keystrokes barely moved the throttle target. Going from a standstill felt like lifting the car off the ground.

Fixed in a bunch of places at once:

• First keystroke from Neutral now snaps the throttle to full target. It used to cap at 0.6, throttled by an input-frequency factor that also wanted ramp-up time, basically two systems both saying "not yet"

• Smoothed CPM now respects your instantaneous typing rate, so you don't have to wait 60 seconds for the rolling average to catch up

• Effective CPM thresholds globally lowered ~%35. Full throttle is now reachable at ~87 CPM instead of 250, rapid-tier kicks in at ~3 keys/sec instead of needing chess-clock fingers

• Speed decay between keystrokes loosened. Typing at ~1 key/sec used to dump you straight into the full-decay tier, so coast was eating your acceleration

Net effect: a 0-60 actually feels like a 0-60. Slower cars feel less punished, faster cars feel less floaty.

Performance

Profiler showed [c]CarController.Update[/c] chewing 5.2 MB of allocations per frame and triggering a 3ms GC.Collect stall once a second. Root cause was [c]CarUpgradeManager.GetLevel[/c] doing string concat plus enum boxing on every call, and [c]CarController.Update[/c] happens to call it ~14 times per frame. Cached, dictionarized, allocation-free now.

End result: the per-second GC.Collect hitch is gone, and the "I dropped from 100 to 60 FPS for no reason" thing should be much rarer.

As always,

• Save writes now retry on Windows when the antivirus grabs a temp file mid-write. No more "being used by another process" log spam, no more spurious [c]needsSyncRecovery[/c] rebuilds

• Confirming an environment selection no longer closes the panel (you can keep browsing biomes without re-opening it)

• Tweaks in the launch curve at very low speeds so the first 0-60 doesn't get clamped to zero anymore

That's it for this one. The upgrade tree is deliberately broad, let me know which upgrades feel undertuned or overtuned, especially Cruise Control's throttle floor and Long-Range Tank's combined effect with EcuRemap. I'll re-balance once there's data.

See you on the road.

– Tolga