DriveWave v1.5.220 - The One Where Your Rims Hit the Market

This is one of the biggest updates since launch. Two headline features, a pile of long-standing bug fixes, and a full save system audit under the hood.

Your wheel drops now actually land in your Steam Inventory

This one is embarrassing and important. Wheel drops were supposed to appear in your Steam Inventory since day one. They never did, for anyone. The grant call we used only works for developer accounts, so it worked in every test and failed silently on every real machine.

That is fixed, and it changes more than it sounds:

• New wheel drops now arrive as real Steam Inventory items, tradable and marketable.

• Wheels you already unlocked in the game are backfilled automatically. Just play with Steam running and your collection will sync to your inventory over your next sessions.

• Ownership is now two way. If you sell or trade a rim away, you lose it in the game too. If you buy one from the Market or a trade, it unlocks in the game without a drop. Selling something actually costs you something, which is what makes buying worth it.

If a wheel you earned does not show up in your inventory after a couple of sessions, ping me on Discord with your Steam name.

About that 5,000,000 km achievement

I have seen the thread thanks to Wightie, and I did the math. At realistic play speeds, 5 million kilometers is roughly 25,000 hours of active driving. That was never going to happen organically, and I am not pretending otherwise.

So here is the deal: once you own 150 cars, a new option appears in Settings that lets you buy mileage with credits, at 10 credits per km. It counts toward the odometer and every distance achievement, including the 5M. It does NOT count on the distance leaderboard. Bought kilometers will never outrank driven ones there.

Distance counters that quietly stopped counting

The "km bug" reports were real, and there were several separate causes: a precision bug that froze the lifetime distance accumulator on long saves, the same bug freezing the session timer, an interrupted environment transition that could silently stop distance from accruing, and a frame rate edge case where fast cars at low FPS stopped adding odometer distance entirely. All four are fixed.

Top speed on fully upgraded hypercars

The physics ceiling was disconnected from the stat card. Upgrades raised the number on the card but not the actual engine limit, so a maxed BB2024 stalled around 700 instead of 750. The physics terminal speed now rises with your upgrades, and upgrades no longer make the car brake harder above its old ceiling. If your maxed build still lands a hair short of the card figure, tell me, I want to know.

Steam overlay could get stuck open

Shift+Tab opened the overlay but clicks fell through it onto your desktop, focus escaped, and the overlay would not close. That is a side effect of DriveWave being a transparent desktop window. The window now becomes solid for input while the overlay is open, so you can click things in it and close it normally.

The wipe button now actually wipes

If you ever used "wipe all data" and found your progress mysteriously back after restart, that was the game re-saving your old data during shutdown. Third time this class of bug has bitten us, so the fix this time is structural: after a wipe, nothing can write to the save files until the game restarts.

Smoother speed at a steady typing pace

If you type at a consistent rhythm you could see the speedometer and RPM flutter around your cruising speed. The throttle logic had a hard threshold that flip flopped every few frames. It is now a smooth ramp, same full throttle point, no oscillation.

Also in this update

• Jukebox panel could permanently lock if you closed and reopened it quickly. Fixed.

• Music toolbar eye toggle now works when music is stopped.

• The welcome plate should now always dismiss itself. Yes, really, this time. The whole hide mechanism was rebuilt.

• Purchases (unlockables, walls) are now written to disk instantly, so a crash right after buying can no longer eat the purchase.

• Handling got a global arcade flavor pass, steering and grip are tuned toward a more MC3 feel across the whole fleet.

• First time window drag tutorial actually shows now (it never did).

• Several slow memory leaks on car swaps and environment transitions are gone.

• A batch of save system hardening for rare disk race conditions, plus more reliable achievement and leaderboard syncing.

See you on the road.

• Tolga 🏁