A small hint of ETS2 tech progress

We are constantly bombarded with requests to show more of what is happening with Euro Truck Simulator 2, but it's complicated now.

On the technology programming side, we have been working on deferred shading for quite a while, but now the time has come to finally integrate the code into the game - to give the artists the access to the tech and tools.

The end result is of course that the artists and designers are at the same time happy with so many new features that they will have at their disposal - true shadows including self-shadowing, true lights, new shader effects, HDR, bloom and the like. But at the same time they are pulling their hair as we realized how many tweaks of existing stuff will be still needed.

Anyway, finally we will have a state-of-the-art graphics engine! It will just take a few more weeks before we can start showing screenshots of all these things properly tuned and balanced, all working as expected at the same time in the scene...

For today, here is just a small teaser that shadows are already finding their way into the game. In these shots only the trucks have shadows enabled. Fortunately, the new technology is quite smart; it will allow all objects in the scene to cast shadows relatively cheap when it comes to performance, so the scenes will look gorgeous even on mid-range hardware. You will notice that this scene doesn't contain any new vegetation or some of the things that we have already talked about - this is exactly the case that many features that people are working on in parallel now need to be finished, integrated and adjusted to work together at the same time, not just as isolated research and development sub-projects. These shots are from a rural area in Poland by the way

Stay tuned!