Trucks & Trailers - our job is not over yet

As the various retail distribution masters are finalized (in the game industry jargon, the game is said to "go gold"), we still have some work to do. We are also working on new digital distribution strategy, using a new payment partner, so hopefully it should be possible to purchase the game not just with a credit card, but also with PayPal, and as we are told with additional no-so-usual payment methods as well. We still need to do some additional programming to make this happen, but we hope to be ready with the online time-limited demo version at the same time as the game hits the store shelves in CD editions.

Our mind is still focused on T&T, and we thought we may do something to keep the game on your radar as well. So here we are with a Trucks & Trailers wallpaper! Several most popular screen resolutions are available for download...

The city of Liege in ETS2

Several people have guessed right! The airport was quite recognizable; here is a couple more shots from the city...

Where is this place? #4

Amsterdam is not the only city in Euro Truck Simulator 2 where the highway passes near the airport... Can you guess where those screen shots are from?

Lots of Trucks & Trailers screens at TruckPol

A few old friends and our biggest supporters over the years among the fan community have had early access to beta builds of Trucks & Trailers, helping us with testing. Among them Jarek from TruckPol, founder of one of the oldest message boards devoted to truck sim games.

Jarek is not only great in testing our games, often spotting bugs that we would overlook otherwise, but he has also a very good eye for taking screenshots. He has put a massive 3-page gallery on TruckPol now, with many images taken from interesting perspectives and angles that our own screenshots haven't yet explored. We recommend that you view the TruckPol gallery yourselves, here is a few teaser images...

Trucks & Trailers about to go "Gold"

At long last, we are starting to produce final CD masters and giving them to our territorial distribution partners this week!

It has been a long road to get this far. Trucks & Trailers started as a small research project, but in the end a small team at SCS Software spent well over half a year turning the initial concept into a well polished game. Thank you for being with us along the way.

We are grateful to everyone who decided to get involved and helped with the collective translation effort. Most languages are almost done, as you can see at http://www.getlocalization.com/truckstrailers/. When we release the digitally distributed version, which should hopefully be ready in a couple of weeks, it will be great that truck fans across the globe will have access to so many language options in the game.

Work-in-progress: Another ETS2 dashboard

We are far from done building the 3D models for Euro Truck Simulator 2...

Spoiling the driver with too much luxury?

Some of the things we are thinking of for Euro Truck Simulator 2 are a bit outside of the the norm, like this luxurious Actros cabin design. It is still an open question if we can pursue such direction, if we can integrate unique things into the game without having them sticking out too much, and also if truck companies wouldn't mind us getting too involved with the cherished special limited editions of their tractors.

Things to populate the ETS2 world with

We are not building just vehicles, landmarks and the map for ETS2, a lot of effort is going into elements that should make the Euro Truck Simulator world more alive, and the gameplay more interesting.

Taking the new Premium for a ride

Euro Truck Simulator 2 - pictures from the countryside in Benelux...

American Long Haul featured on Steam!

18 Wheels of Steel American Long Haul is featured as "Today's Deal" on Steam right now.

This is quite surprising for us, considering that Steam has refused to carry Trucks & Trailers. Well maybe they will reconsider if they see good old ALH to sell a few copies during this promo sale? It's really great deal if you have passed on the game so far... ;-)

ETS2 - a new tractor model almost finished

We are making good progress with a new truck model for Euro Truck Simulator 2, the exterior is almost done.

We are still talking to Renault Trucks, still optimistic about coming to positive conclusion in our brand licensing quest. If you look up the very first mention on this blog about us talking to them (and we actually started much earlier), you may get an idea of how much time and effort is being burnt on the licensing talks!

Final touches on Trucks & Trailers

We have to apologize for the lack of updates in the past days, we have been extremely busy. We have to finalize the game for retail release by the end of this week.

Many people are asking about T&T release date. This question doesn't have a simple answer; there is not a single world-wide release date as might be the case with big AAA games published by global publishers. We have country-by-country partnerships in place, and each of those local distributors will work according to their own schedule. We already have several territorial distribution deals signed, and are still trying to work on more.

So far we are pretty optimistic that the game will launch in the middle of June in Germany, Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia, Hungary, France and United Kingdom. Chances are some other local editions will hit the same release window too - Russia, Scandinavia. If you do not see your country mentioned above, we are sorry, but either something is blocking the business, or in many cases we cannot even find a company interested in publishing our games in the territory. This is surprisingly a problem even in countries where we know we have a huge number of fans, like Turkey or Romania. But we are not giving up and are still trying hard to negotiate additional distribution deals.

As for the digitally distributed edition of the game which will give players access to the community translations, we will release it about the same time. We cannot release it much sooner, retail stores do not like to see digital distribution damaging their business too much, and they would see this earlier release date as unfair competition. We still rely a lot on brick-and-mortar store sales, this is where most copies are sold, so we need to treat retail distribution with full respect.

The Trucks & Trailers team is so busy now that we'll wrap this blog posts with images from the other project; ETS2. It's not too hard to guess where they are from...

Trucks & Trailers final stretch

We are now very close to delivery deadline to get T&T out on the retail shelves on time. Final tweaks and optimizations are still under way, as people who participate on the GetLocalization effort can witness with changes in the game texts every few days.

Somewhere in Belgium #3

It seems that Google is still not quite finished getting the Blogger system back to shape, still struggling to restore the lost posts and comments. Let's try to publish a few new screen shots and see what happens...

Trucks & Trailers confirmed for Poland

We are happy to confirm that Trucks & Trailers has been licensed for retail release in Poland, and will be published in the country by CD Project. Here is their own announcement.

Trucks & Trailers localization update

We are still polishing the game, and still adding or changing a few words here or a few words there in the original English text, so the translations are under constant changes, too.

We feel very good now about the quality of translation in many languages, but you can still help to make things even better. Thank you!

http://www.trucks-and-trailers.com/localization.html

Interview with SCS on SvetSim.cz

A short interview with SCS Software's founder and CEO Pavel Šebor was posted on Czech language website  SvetSim. The quality of Google Machine Translation is more or less bearable.

One more dashboard under construction

This one is a little less finished, but progressing well...

We find it very useful to present early work to the community, your feedback on imperfections is definitely going to help us build a better game than if we were doing it all behind locked doors.

Texturing Actros interior

Still under development, here is the result of a few day's worth of work on the interior that we have already shown a few days ago.

Somewhere in Belgium #2

One more picture to complement the series from yesterday.

State of translations - what a difference a week makes

Last week at this moment, some 200 people were hard at work translating Trucks & Trailers. Today, only a few of the most loyal are still trying to polish the translations. Several languages are still unfinished, or almost but not quite complete, and we are still hoping for the final push. Please stay with us, as we are closer to the finish line, now is the time to help to tidy the translations up. We appreciate your support and help very much.

http://www.trucks-and-trailers.com/inspect/current_state.php

http://www.getlocalization.com/truckstrailers/

It has been indeed a very interesting experiment, and I hope many of you are enjoying it. We have witnessed (even if not always completely understood) very active discussions in some language groups, like for example in German or Russian, and it seems that those guys really are trying very hard to make their translations superb quality. We have witnessed (and not understood at all) some controversy (like fighting groups in split Turkish translations), but we hope that in the end the results will be worth it.

We may still need to pass the results through professional proofreaders, the quality and especially the consistency may not be 100%, but our overall impression is very positive. Consider that the community is giving itself a major gift. Even if the translations end up not being perfect, when did you last play a game on day of release localized into Greek, Turkish, Bulgarian or Norwegian Bokmål as well as Nynorsk? T&T may be quite unique in this regard. And yes, you may be helping us in the selfish capitalist goal of making as much money as possible though sales to people who wouldn't understand the game otherwise. But the way we work, with everything being reinvested straight into future vehicle simulators, you are actually investing your sweat equity into helping us make our future games better, complete them sooner, and make them understandable to more people. THANK YOU!

Somewhere in Belgium

There will be lots of opportunities to drive on the much-demanded small roads in Euro Truck Simulator 2.

Quick update on work in progress vehicle

Sorry for lack of updates, this was a very busy week for us. We are now preparing some more material to make a couple of posts during the weekend to keep you entertained and give you something to discuss :-).