Internationale Automobil-Ausstellung Hannover

A small team from SCS Software ventured to Hannover, Germany, to visit IAA - International Commercial Vehicles show. To describe it in one word, it is huge. There were hundreds and hundreds of vehicles on display, but also all kinds of parts, aftermarket upgrades and research concepts, trucks, buses, vans and trailers, a giant mixture of shiny technology mixed with business guys wearing jackets and ties and beautiful booth babes posing next to trucks.

We pursued several objectives at IAA. Of course one of them was to take a lot of photos for research purposes. It was a rare opportunity to get into the cabin of the high-class trucks, to zoom in on all the details in and around the vehicles. The photos will be a valuable extension for our database - to tap into whenever we build new or improve existing 3D models and textures. We already put some of the photos for your viewing pleasure to our Facebook page, and more photos will follow shortly. The impressions from how the transportation industry presents itself is also definitely going to have an influence on our visual design decisions, and maybe even help in enriching game mechanics.

Another objective was to check out German Truck Simulator running as a demo at one of the booths. Yes, GTS is at IAA right now in playable form, used for illustrating the application of eye-tracking, head-tracking and hand-tracking biomechanics tools at Commercial Vehicle Group booth. CVG is the leading supplier of seating for trucks and buses in the US, and we are looking at opportunities with them for possibly adapting our technology for their cab design research & development needs.

Finally, we tried to approach brand management and marketing/PR people from the truck manufacturing companies about the possibility of including real truck brands into our future games. It seems that IAA is the place to be, as we got far more traction approaching people in person there than we managed to achieve in the past three years by e-mails and phone calls. We are of course not sure if we eventually manage to persuade the giant truck manufacturing corporations to give enough attention to small SCS Software and consider the matter and the benefits of having their brand, treated with all respect, clearly visible by players of our games. But we have talked to important people, gave them samples of the game and the "elevator pitch" of why we think it would be a good idea for them to come aboard, and now it's down to patiently working from this start.

Crazy Truck Party

We are back from Czech Truck Fest, tired but full of impressions. We have tons of photos and videos, but experiencing the atmosphere first-hand was really cool, and the insights we have gathered will come handy.

Here is a short movie from Saturday evening - from Best Lit Truck competition. It was already getting late and our camera did not handle difficult light conditions very well, but you can see that it was wild. This just one of several waves of trucks as they took turns on the airfield during the evening.

First day of Truck Fest

People have been lining up all day to try our games. We got a ton of input especially from the younger generation of players. We rarely get to see complete newbies playing our games so closely, and this was an important lesson for us. On the other hand, many people stopping at our stand already knew our games well and played them before.

Here is an image of a really cool Scania. We have taken a huge amount of photos and footage, this is going to be a new source of inspiration for our future games. We will be posting more photos and perhaps movies from the event over time. Now we have to prepare for another day of the show ahead of us tomorrow...

Packing for the trip

We got the hardware, we got the posters, we got the boxes with the games, we got the T-shirts. Now we are about to stuff it into a van as we are starting out very early tomorrow.

Here is an artist's rendition of our journey from Prague to Hradec Kralove :-).

See you at Truck Fest!

Come see us at Czech Truck Fest 2010

We are going to be at Czech Truck Fest 2010 this coming weekend (September 11-12), demonstrating and selling our games, and taking lots of pictures. If you you don't live too far from Hradec Kralove, CZ, it may be a good tip for a weekend trip. www.truckfest.cz

We will have copies of both older Euro Truck Simulator as well as newer German Truck Simulator for sale for a special exhibition price. Unfortunately, we'll only have the Czech language version for sale, we have not managed to secure stock from other language versions. Well we may have a dozen or so English language or German language copies, but we cannot guarantee good availability.

We are also going to be showing the games on big LCD screen, with a steering wheel and TrackIR head tracking gear. Check out what it looks like - this is from our testing of the demonstration gear in the office today.

Hopefully the weather is going to be nice over the weekend, weather forecast looks optimistic. You can look forward to coverage from the show here on the blog.

Lights, horns, beacons, bars, shields, mirrors...

One of the features that we are concentrating on for Euro Truck Simulator 2 is customization of trucks. Here is an example:

Euro Truck Simulator 2 vehicle customization

We are trying to design the system to be very flexible. In addition to the tuning parts that the game will come with and that will be available "out of the box," it should be possible to cleanly add more parts via mods, without making a mess of it. The game should recognize additional parts and offer them for purchase in addition to the original ones.

Welcome to our blog!

We are excited to launch our official blog to offer our fans insight into what is happening at SCS Software.

We plan to post screen shots of games under development, share behind the scenes information, and point out interesting places on the net related to SCS Software's games - communities, reviews, mods, movies...

Keep on the lookout for upcoming posts, the first few weeks may be a bit rocky as we are only learning to use our blog properly, but we hope to make coming back worth it for you.

Thanks so much for visiting our blog. Enjoy!