Monday, October 31, 2011

Scenic local roads

The ratio of local roads versus major highways is increased in Euro Truck Simulator 2 compared to any of our older games. Of course with the compressed scale of the virtual world we don't even have enough room to cover all important highways, and inevitably the selection of local roads is even more limited. But they work really great to spice things up and add variety to the overall experience.






Friday, October 28, 2011

Embedding experiment

Often we think if we are not boring you too much with static screenshots, and we thought about a little experiment. We have created a 360 panarama view inside the cabin of a truck we are building for Euro Truck Simulator 2.

Will this link work for you?

https://sites.google.com/site/scscontent/volvo_fh16_out.swf

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Know-how boost

For many years, the team at SCS Software has been trying to make truck simulator games without having a trucker among us to help us get things right. Inevitably, we have only been scratching the surface of transportation industry knowledge. Things are about to change though!

We are happy to welcome a valuable addition to our family - Irenej "Jirka" Stalmach.


Jirka has been for many years a test driver and driving instructor at Scania Czech Republic, and now he has kindly agreed to keep an eye on our projects and assist us in fixing the most glaring sins against trucker lore in our games. It may take non-trivial time to address the various imperfections, but we are hoping to establish long-term cooperation way beyond the release of Euro Truck Simulator 2, to guide us in our quest to build true truck simulators one day.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

A few random screen shots

Hi guys, we have been very busy in the past few days to even spend a while on making new screenshots, but we hear your calls for an update on the blog. So we went through our older shots and picked a few that were not yet posted here. They are not revealing anything that you haven't seen yet, very similar pictures have already been published, but at least you see we are still around and trying to make you happy! :-)




Friday, October 21, 2011

Night Driving

We are thinking of making the night in Euro Truck Simulator 2 much darker than in any of our previous games. In the previous games, we had to make a compromise and make sure that the ambient light at night was still strong enough for the player to be able to make out his surroundings. With ETS2, our new "true" projected lights in the 3D engine allow us to emulate the light conditions at night much better, without making the game borderline unplayable.




Sunday, October 16, 2011

ETS2 cities

This user interface screen from Euro Truck Simulator 2 is going to reveal quite a bit about the span of Europe covered in the game.



This screen doesn't show the UK destinations, as they were not in the particular build of the game when this image was grabbed, but a considerably reworked map from UKTS will be merged in too.

It may be a disappointment for some of our fans from countries not covered here, but this is as good as we have managed so far after almost 2 years of work on the game. With the attention to detail we are pursuing, and much denser road coverage compared to original Euro Truck Simulator, adding in countries is a tedious and slow process. For comparison, while the original ETS map represented circa 1.5 man-year of work, we have already sunk over eight man-years into the ETS2 map, and we are not quite finished yet.

Is this all? Depends on you. We would love to continue extending the ETS2 world beyond the release of the initial version of the game, but it all depends on support that we receive from the fan base. But we have already ranted on this topic multiple times, and it's well past midnight here in Prague.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Random screen shots along the road

We are still here, still working hard on the game, sorry that the blog gets neglected a bit. We plan to have some unveils of cool ETS2 facts and features in the coming weeks, but for now, to satisfy your never ceasing appetite for more news, let us just post a few nice screens which we took this week on request from one of our distribution partners.





Friday, October 7, 2011

Route Advisor

One of cool new features of Euro Truck Simulator 2 is the Route Advisor. It is a combination of a navigation unit, scheduling device, diagnostics and communication module. Rather than using abstract user interface elements, we are trying to produce a believable "gadget" - a smart box that every truck driver would love to have with him or her on the road in our ETS2 world.



Route Advisor is not dissimilar to existing devices used by the transportation industry these days. In reality, the Big Brother aspects of these little boxes is not something that truckers would be so excited about.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Truck customization

Today we have a glimpse at the "tuning" interface screen from Euro Truck Simulator 2. It is showing a wealth of categories to customize for the tractors, we hope that you will be happy with this new major feature in our game...



Disclaimer: Any appearance of real brands appearing on these work-in-progress screenshots is only tentative, we are still negotiating with the European truck manufacturers trying to get their approval to portray their fully branded vehicles in our game.